Why use an abstract factory - abstract-factory

Trying to figure out the difference between factory and abstract factory.
From what I understand, I would use a factory when I want to create objects with same properties but different type (for example - I want to have 10 horses, with same weight, height and age, but they should differ in name).
So I create an interface (or maybe abstract class?) that already takes care of the weight, height and age, and just feeds it with name when I want to create a new horse.
Assume I want to add colour property to the horses. Would that be a good reason to use an abstract factory? I will get 2 factories - one for black horses and one for brown horses. Does it make any sense?

The abstract factory pattern revolves around creating a factory that builds other factories. So you would rather use it when you have a scenario where you know you want to construct for instance horses, cows and MAYBE also pigs and sheep to follow your analogy. Given they are all farm animals, they will likely share a lot of properties and thus their factories should be similiar in some senses, so you can create a factory of factories to produce a skeleton "farm animal factory".
From this you can now produce a horse factory, cow factory and whatever else you need.
So basically it is abstracting the factory concept further, so that you can use a template way of creating not only objects but the factories that will produce them...

Related

Entity/Component concepts of GameplayKit

I am designing my game with Entity/Component concepts of GameplayKit in iOS 9, for ShootComponent, should define bullet/missile as Entity?
Reason for Yes:
separate logic from its parent, e.g. playerTank or enemyTank;
if not, TankEntity need distinguish whether its bullet collide with other Entities or itself.
Reason for No:
it is not actual entity in logic world, which is fired by my tank or enemy turret;
bullet always be shot and disappeared, so game need add/remove it now and then;
For your comments pls.
Finally decided to define bullet/missile as entity, so it acts as entity in contact test, rendering and other components.
I would have add it as a component for the entity using it.
So you will be able to make any entity fire bullet or missile.
Keep in mind that your entity should only act as a simple reference with no logic in it.
First lets read Adam Martins original description of his terms. It appears Apple got the idea of entities and components from Martin:
Entity: The entity is a general-purpose object. Usually, it only consists of a unique id.
Component: the raw data for one aspect of the object, and how it interacts with the world.
System: "Each System runs continuously (as though each System had its own private thread) and performs global actions on every Entity that possesses a Component or Components that match that Systems query."
Martin is just defining terms for doing compositional design, which is an alternative to inheritance that is more recombinable and flexible.
So entities are what you might recognize as instances of a class, but classes have been stripped of all their data and methods, which has been moved out into components - and the entities just delegate to the components.
So your missile... it would be an instance of a class in normal OO terms - an object, right? And a missile can behave in a variety of ways... it can seek out an enemy, it can fly straight ahead, it can speed up, etc. It also has properties that indicate if it's hit an enemy, properties for its total damage, health, and so on.
So the missile is an entity while these various methods / data would be components of the missile entity.
Martins approach is interesting, and there hasn't been as much focus on compositional design as there has been OO (for what reason I don't really know), so I can see why Apple would adopt it for a game framework like this.
But his ideas don't seem very well fleshed out. For example, usually in compositional design there is a delegation hierarchy, where objects will keep delegating up a chain until some data or method is found. At the top there's one meta-object that everything delegates to. In this way objects are both components and entities - they act as both the delegating and the delegated to. But Martins terms don't support this... his model is flat - there are only entities, and then components that can be added to them, but no delegation between entities and no meta-object.
Maybe he felt this flat design was appropriate for game development. I have my doubts... you seem to want some kind of hierarchical structure of objects. I would look for a way to mix in inheritance, or setup some kind of custom delegation hierarchy where objects could act as both entities and components. You might look to see if this is possible within that framework, or if it isn't just write your own.

How factory is implemented inside UVM?

In UVM, factory is the most important thing. So how it is implemented inside. Means how it stores the various objects and create a universal database.
I know something like it has some assossiative arrays, one with key as object name and another with key as object type. But I don't know how this 2 arrays can build the database? Even I don't know that my information is proper or not.
Please also list out some related classes for factory implementation and modification. (Like umv_resource is one maybe.)
This DVcon paper Using Parameterized Classes and Factories: The Yin and Yang of Object-Oriented Verification was written with the UVM factory in mind before it was publicly released. All the same principals apply.

Conceptualization: generalization or not?

I'm modeling an app which will let users look for real estate properties. So it's going to be a website where users will be able to look for rentals and sales on houses, flats, castles, grounds, shops, parkings, offices. According to that, I'm hesitating in the class diagram. Should I generalize all the type of real estate properties, written above, from the class RealEstateProperty or should I just associate to it a class TypeOfRealEstate, knowing that the type "Ground" for example can be as well a real estate property as the ground of a property like a House or a Castle. Also a parking can be a real estate property as well as a parking of a House.
Anyone has an idea of what's the best way to do that ? Thanks in advance.
It depends of what features of different RealEstates your system has to implement. A class's features include attributes, methods and associations.
If all your potential RealEstates have same features, for example ID, type, price, date and responible agent, and you don't need to firther differenciate among them, than the associated type will do the work. Model RealEstateType as an Enum (or even class, if you expect to add new types) and associate it to a single RealEstate class.
If different RealEstates, on the another extreme, need to have different features, you will need to inherit those from the base abstract class. For example, Ground have an attribute "area", while building has "number of floors". Even methods can be different, or associations.
Following your example, you would like to link Ground to House. This is much cleaner in the second version - just an association between Ground and House class. In one-class version, you would have to link the RealEstate with itself and add spacial restrictopns (very "ugly" design).
In summary, try to think about the features of different RealEstates and make your RealEstate hierarchy based on their differences.
You can end up with a single class or several dozens of them. :) Try to keep this hierarchy as simple as possible (less classes), but enough to mark their different features clarly.

What are disadvantages of Abstract factory design pattern?

As usual to build the project with different design patterns, architects always prefer the advantageous view of that particular design pattern. But sometimes it need to understand what should be the violation area and disadvantages in terms of future extension of project. I am using Abstract factory design pattern now a days. I understood it but unable to figure out its disadvantages,its limitations, where it will get fail. can somebody please explain me this another view of Abstract Factory design pattern?
First, with any design pattern you are adding more layers of abstraction and complexity, so only apply the pattern when the pain of not having it is apparent. This is a similar idea to Bob Martin's "Take the first bullet" and Nathan Marz' "Suffering-Oriented Programming."
With Abstract Factory in particular, the decision about which factory to use is made at runtime. Typically, this is done in some code dedicated to providing the right factory by conditional branching based on some key piece of information. This means as more factories are created, this central decision point must be modified. That's annoying.
Finally, if there are any changes to any underlying detail of one factory, the interface might need to be modified for all the factories. This breaks clients. So as usual, take great care with the choice of interfaces.

DDD domain services: what should a service class contain?

In Domain Driven Design, domain services should contain operations that do not naturally belong inside an entity.
I've had the habit to create one service per entity and group some methods inside it (Organization entity and OrganizationService service).
But the more I think about it: OrganizationService doesn't mean anything, "Organization" is not a service, it's a thing.
So right now I have to add a Organization deep copy functionality that will duplicate a whole Organization aggregate, so I want to put it in a service.
Should I do: OrganizationService::copyOrganization(o)?
Or should I do: OrganizationCopyService::copyOrganization(o)?
More generally: is a "service" an abstract concept containing several operations, or is a service a concrete operation?
Edit: more examples given the first one wasn't that good:
StrategyService::apply()/cancel() or StrategyApplicationService::apply()/cancel()? ("Application" here is not related to the application layer ;)
CarService::wash() or CarWashingService::wash()?
In all these examples the most specific service name seems the most appropriate. After all, in real life, "car washing service" is something that makes sense. But I may end up with a lot of services...
*Note: this is not a question about opinions! This is a precise, answerable question about the Domain Driven Design methodology. I'm always weary of close votes when asking "should I", but there is a DDD way of doing things.*
I think it's good if a domain service has only one method. But I don't think it is a rule like you must not have more than one method on a domain service or something. If the interface abstracts only one thing or one behaviour, it's certainly easy to maitain but the granularity of the domain service totally depends on your bounded context. Sometimes we focus on low coupling too much and neglect high cohesive.
This is a bit opinion based I wanted to add it as a comment but ran out space.
I believe that in this case it will make sense to group the methods into one a separate OrganizationFactory-service with different construction method.
interface OrganizationFactory{
Organization createOrganization();
Organization createOrganizationCopy(Organization organization);
}
I suppose it will be in accordance with information expert pattern and DRY principle - one class has all the information about specific object creation and I don't see any reason to repeat this logic in different places.
Nevertheless, an interesting thing is that in ddd definition of factory pattern
Shift the responsibility for creating instances of complex objects and
AGGREGATES to a separate object, which may itself have no
responsibility in the domain model but is still part of the domain
design. Provide an interface that encapsulates all complex assembly
and that does not require the client to reference the concrete classes
of the objects being instantiated.
the word "object" is in a generic sense doesn't even have to be a separate class but can also be a factory method(I mean both the method of a class and the pattern factory method) - later Evans gives an example of the factory method of Brokerage Account that creates instances of Trade Order.
The book references to the family of GoF factory patterns and I do not think that there's a special DDD way of factory decomposition - the main points are that the object created is not half-baked and that the factory method should add as few dependecies as possible.
update DDD is not attached to any particular programming paradigm, while the question is about object-oriented decomposition, so again I don't think that DDD can provide any special recommendations on the number of methods per object.
Some folks use strange rules of thumb, but I believe that you can just go with High Cohesion principle and put methods with highly related responsibilities together. As this is a DDD question, so I suppose it's about domain services(i.e. not infrastructure services). I suppose that the services should be divided according to their responsibilities in the domain.
update 2 Anyway CarService can do CarService::wash()/ CarService::repaint() / CarService::diagnoseAirConditioningProblems() but it will be strange that CarWashingService will do CarWashingService::diagnoseAirConditioningProblems() it's like in Chomsky's generative grammar - some statements(sentences) in the language make sense, some don't. But if your sentence contains too much subjects(more than say 5-7) it also will be difficult to understand, even if it is valid sentence in language.

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