What are creational design patterns?

Creational design patterns handle object creation. They allow a consumer to create object instances without knowing the details of how to instantiate the object. Since, in object-oriented languages, instantiation of objects is limited to a class’s constructor, allowing object instances to be created without calling the constructor is useful to reduce noise and tight coupling between the consumer and the class being instantiated.

In JavaScript, there’s ambiguity when we discuss “object creation,” since JavaScript’s multi-paradigm nature means we can create objects without a class or a constructor. For example, in JavaScript this is an object creation using an object literal – const config = { forceUpdate: true }. In fact, modern idiomatic JavaScript tends to lean more toward procedural and function paradigms than object orientation. This means that creational design patterns may have to be adapted to be fully useful in JavaScript.

In summary, creational design patterns are useful in object-oriented JavaScript, since they hide instantiation details from consumers, which keeps coupling low, thereby allowing better module separation.

In the next section, we’ll encounter our first creational design pattern – the prototype design pattern.