Type : | St (Structural) |
Intent : | Use sharing to support large numbers of fine-grained objects efficiently. |
Applicability : | The Flyweight pattern's effectiveness depends heavily on how and where it's used. Apply the Flyweight pattern when all of the following are true : - An application uses a large number of objects. - Storage costs are high because of the sheer quantity of objects. - Most object state can be made extrinsic. - Many groups of objects may be replaced by relatively few shared objects once extrinsic state is removed. - The application doesn't depend on object identity. Since flyweight objects may be shared, identity tests will return true for conceptually distinct objects. |