What are some common, real world examples of using the Builder Pattern? What does it buy you? Why not just use a Factory Pattern?
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What are some common, real world examples of using the Builder Pattern? What does it buy you? Why not just use a Factory Pattern?
The key difference between a builder and factory IMHO, is that a builder is useful when you need to do lots of things to build an object. For example imagine a DOM. You have to create plenty of nodes and attributes to get your final object. A factory is used when the factory can easily create the entire object within one method call.
One example of using a builder is a building an XML document, I’ve used this model when building HTML fragments for example I might have a Builder for building a specific type of table and it might have the following methods (parameters are not shown):
This builder would then spit out the HTML for me. This is much easier to read than walking through a large procedural method.
Check out Builder Pattern on Wikipedia.