- Decorating a CoolButton
- Handling Events in a Decorator
- Multiple Decorators
- Nonvisual Decorators
- Decorators, Adapters, and Composites
- Consequences of the Decorator Pattern
- Thought Questions
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Consequences of the Decorator Pattern
The Decorator pattern provides a more flexible way to add responsibilities to a class than by using inheritance, since it can add these responsibilities to selected instances of the class. It also allows you to customize a class without creating subclasses high in the inheritance hierarchy. Design Patterns points out two disadvantages of the Decorator pattern. One is that a Decorator and its enclosed component are not identical. Thus, tests for object types will fail. The second is that Decorators can lead to a system with “lots of little objects” that all look alike to the programmer trying to maintain the code. This can be a maintenance headache.
Decorator and Façade evoke similar images in building architecture, but in design pattern terminology, the Façade is a way of hiding a complex system inside a simpler interface, whereas Decorator adds function by wrapping a class. We’ll take up the Façade next.