Special

Introducing the “Welcome to Xojo” Bundle!

New to Xojo and looking for guidance? We've put together a terrific bundle to welcome you! Xojo Bundle

This bundle includes six back issues of the magazine -- all of year 21 in printed book and digital formats -- plus a one-year subscription (beginning with 22.1) so you'll be learning all about Xojo for the next year. It's the perfect way to get started programming with Xojo. And you save as much as $35 over the non-bundle price!

This offer is only available for a limited time as supplies are limited, so hurry today and order this special bundle before the offer goes away!

Article Preview


Buy Now

Issue 22.1 ('Sandstorm')
Instant purchase and download via GumRoad!

FEATURE

Design Patterns Part 2

The Decorator (Wrapper) Pattern

Issue: 22.1 (January/February 2024)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 25,697
Starting Page Number: 20
Article Number: 22103
Resource File(s):

Download Icon project 22103.zip Updated: 2023-12-31 23:50:47

Related Link(s): None

Excerpt of article text...

Last issue (xDev 21.6) I began a series on Design Patterns, based on my XDC London 2023 talk last spring. If you're new to this series, I highly recommend beginning with that first part, as I cover the basics of object-oriented programming (OOP), which is crucial for understanding patterns.

Remember, design patterns aren't some magical solution you can just apply to your app and make it work better. Design patterns are a strategy, and basically make OOP better (and force you to use more OOP in your projects). As one example, OOP strives to help you decouple code—break the links between code to make it more flexible and easier to change and prevent spaghetti code. However, it's easy to still write OO code that's too linked —many Design Patterns will help you decouple code more effectively.

The Decorator Pattern

Today we're going to tackle the Decorator pattern. This is sometimes called the Wrapper pattern; I personally like that better. To me Decorator sounds like it changes the appearance of an item, like how a style sheet in word processor controls a font choice. Really what it does is wrap around an item to make it seem like something else.

Why is that useful? Specifically because it lets us create a more generic routine capable of handling many different kinds of objects.

For example, say you've got a printing routine that accepts text. What happens when you want to print a graphic? Now you've got to create a new routine for graphics printing (and maybe ones for different types of graphics, such as vector versus bitmap).

...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.