Understanding the Proxy design pattern

Proxy, in general terms, is a system that intermediates between the seeker and provider. Seeker is the one that makes the request, and provider delivers the resources in response to the request. In the web world, we can relate this to a proxy server. The clients (users in the World Wide Web), when they make a request to the website, first connect to a proxy server asking for resources such as a web page. The proxy server internally evaluates this request, sends it to an appropriate server, and gets back the response, which is then delivered to the client. Thus, a proxy server encapsulates requests, enables privacy, and works well in distributed architectures.

In the context of design patterns, Proxy is a class that acts as an interface to real objects. Objects can be of several types such as network connections, large objects in memory and file, among others. In short, Proxy is a wrapper or agent object that wraps the real serving object. Proxy could...