Software Design Patterns – This article is intended to explain the concept of design patterns in a simplified way and to give you an overview of the individual major groups.

Software architecture can be compared to the architecture of a house. So needs the application development in the planning also consists of the design and the construction of a meaningful, stable structure.

During implementation, it is really only about problem definition and solution with the tools given to you. Many of the steps are repetitive and follow routine patterns. The experience of the user or architect plays a major role here.
What do I apply when and how?

What are Software Design Patterns?

For many processes, there are already very optimized, proven templates that can be reused. Through these so-called design patterns, it is therefore possible to indirectly access the experience of others. The concept goes back to the architect Christopher Alexander and was subsequently used by computer scientists as a basis for conceptual design in software architecture.

These Patterns are categorized on the basis their characteristics in so-called Design Pattern Catalogs and logically grouped around a certain clarity to create. These characteristics can be for example pattern similarities among themselves, the applicability, or the consequences. Many literature deal with this classification topic. The categorizations shown in the following figure may therefore differ depending on the point of view.

This diagram shows the 4 Important software design patterns.
4 Important Software Design Patterns.

Creational Patterns

The Creational Design Patterns deal with object and class creation. How can object creations be inherited from other objects and to what extent can classes be instantiated by subclasses? How are these instantiations created and linked?

Patterns should create object creation mechanisms with which object creations are controlled and thus the object is created purposefully on the respective situation. Flexibility and reusability are the intended goals here.
Thereby the construction is separated from the concrete implementation.
In the following scheme some patterns, which are to be assigned to the creational patterns, are represented.

Software Design Patterns - This scheme shows some Creational Patterns examples
Software Design Patterns – Creational Patterns examples

Structural Design Patterns

How do I create large, cohesive, yet efficient structures? How do I properly optimize the interaction of my entities? Structural Design Patterns should help with these questions and standardize the composition of objects and classes. So the focus here is on establishing individual relationships.
The following figure shows some of the patterns assigned here.

Software Design Patterns - This scheme shows some Structural Patterns examples
Software Design Patterns -Structural Patterns examples

It is often a matter of optimizing and saving inheritance processes. For example, objects can be enclosed in a tree structure, which then all use the same interface, or general properties can be moved to a single object, which is then shared by all other objects. Pipelines can be built and process chains can be formed.

Behavioral Patterns

In addition to the efficient assignment and allocation of entities, communication must also be optimized. At this level, the different transfers among them also describe a structural flow of control. These behavioral patterns can be very complex and difficult to grasp, but are determined by how the individual objects are connected to each other.

So how are responsibilities distributed? Behavioral patterns are intended to help increase the flexibility of the software in terms of its behavior in carrying out this communication.
In the following diagram some patterns are represented, which are to be assigned to the Behavioral Patterns.

Software Design Patterns - This scheme shows some Behavioral Patterns examples
Software Design Patterns Behavioral Patterns examples


For example, inheritance between classes is used to distribute behavior between classes. This inheritance is a sequence of different algorithms that retrieve operations in predefined order and are defined, instantiated, and implemented.
Also, behaviors of objects can be encapsulated instead of distributing them across classes. Another behavioral pattern approach is an observer pattern where the dependencies between objects are observed.

Concurrency Patterns

Like also computations at the same time, thus parallel can be executed, so also models can be created parallel.
So whole program instances can be encapsulated as processes and run isolated, or a program can be divided into several threads, which all access the same memory area, but can also work in parallel.
Where which pattern can be used depends on all the workload conditions present and must be carefully coordinated to effectively avoid overload peaks. The following diagram shows some examples of concurrency patterns.

Software Design Patterns - This scheme shows some Concurrency Patterns examples
Software Design Patterns Concurrency Patterns examples

Conclusion

Since not every problem solution has to be developed by oneself, strategically applied design patterns can save time and resources. They can ensure that programs run effectively. A certain standardization is created. This is especially important for cross-team development. A software product is thereby uniformly and coherently conceived and implemented.

Nevertheless, these templates are often criticized. Why is that?
A decisive factor is that design patterns must not be seen as an all-purpose solution. The individual templates must be understood by the developer in order to use them efficiently. Does the template fit my problem 100 percent, or am I creating extra work again?

Design patterns allow you to access the experience of others, but require your own experience in working with these solutions.

If you are interested in more architectural thinking. Here we have put together another interesting software design the Domain Driven Design.