For this week’s blog post I will be discussing the decorator design pattern discussed in Derek Banas’ Design Pattern Video Tutorial’s found on YouTube. Here you can find pretty much any design pattern you are interested in where he will discuss it in a video usually under 15 minutes.
You use this design pattern when you want the capabilities of inheritance with subclasses but know you need to add functionally at run time. You can modify an object dynamically because of this. Decorator Design is more flexible than inheritance. Simplifies code because you add the functionality using many simple classes, causing you to be allowed to extend with new code. The example he uses explaining the pattern is a great one. You have a pizza and you want to be able to put multiple toppings on top and such. He shows how messy it can be with simple subclasses and an inheritance-based system. Then he shows how to do it in the design pattern showing how useful it can be in situations like this. Essentially you make a pizza interface, with a concrete class being a plain pizza where you can modify its toppings. Then you have a Topping Decorator abstract class where the bases for the toppings will go, followed by a topping class for each topping you’d like to have. Next, he runs through what this would like in code. He writes the code out improving upon the previous inheritance-based code he had down before. What he writes is a much cleaner and simpler version of what he set out to do which is made possible by the decorator design pattern.
This entire YouTube channel, specifically this playlist of his is perfect for learning any of the design patterns we may or may not discuss in class or you want to learn on your own. Like I said above he explains everything in detail in a good pace where almost anyone could understand what is happening in the video. Along with the examples he shows and writes in real time, I recommend this channel/playlist to anyone who is interested in learning design patterns.
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