Motivation. The AbstractFactory (87) pattern [resents to clients a collection of related, abstract interfaces to manipulate. The implementation is provided by concrete subclasses created by a factory which decides which instances to create. The client doesn't know the subclasses, but the factory has to know all concrete subclasses. Rather than linking with the factory library which includes all concrete subclasses, the factory is moved to DLLs. This means that factories can be added and replaced on the fly, without the client having to be recompiled or relinked with the factory libraries. Changes to the funtionality of a system can therefore be easily done and an incremental development style is supported.
By: Bela Ban and Luca Deri
Published in: RZ2787 in 1996
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