The flyweight pattern
This pattern can be used when the system needs to deal with a large number of similar objects. Instead of creating each element one by one, this pattern permits you to reuse an object that shares the same data.
Roles
The flyweight pattern is used to reduce the memory and resource usage of complex models that contain many hundreds and thousands of similar objects by reducing the number of objects created. It tries to reuse similar existing objects or creates a new one when no match is found.
This pattern can be used when:
- We need to manipulate a lot of small similar objects
- The cost (the memory/execution time) of this manipulation is high
Design
The following class diagram represents the generic structure of the pattern:
Participants
There are three participants to the flyweight pattern, as follows:
Flyweight: This declares an interface that contains an intrinsic state and implements methods. These methods can receive and act on the extrinsic state of the flyweights.FlyweightFactory...
