The Strategy Pattern is a design pattern in software development that falls under the category of behavioral patterns. It is used to define a family of algorithms or behaviors, make them interchangeable, and decouple them from the implementing class.
The goal of the Strategy Pattern is to provide a unified interface for different variants of an algorithm or behavior, allowing them to be swapped out without requiring changes to the using class. This enables greater flexibility and extensibility of the code.
The main components of the Strategy Pattern are:
Context: The Context is the class that uses the different strategies. It holds a reference to the currently selected strategy object.
Strategy: The Strategy is the abstract interface or abstract class that defines the different variants of the algorithm. It specifies the method(s) that must be implemented by the concrete strategies.
ConcreteStrategy: These are the concrete implementations of the Strategy interface. Each implementation represents a specific algorithm or behavior.
The flow works as follows: The Context uses one of the concrete strategies to perform a particular operation. If the requirements change or a different algorithm needs to be used, the Context can dynamically switch the strategy by selecting another concrete strategy.
The Strategy Pattern is commonly used when there are multiple variants of an algorithm or behavior that can be used in an application and when high flexibility and interchangeability between these variants are required. It also helps keep the code clean and maintainable, as the different strategies can be developed and tested separately without affecting the Context class.
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