Dart Design Patterns are pre-made solutions to frequently occurring challenges in Flutter development. Generally, such design patterns are guides or templates that can be applied in more than one situation. They explain how you can tackle a challenge or issue you’re facing in your development process. You should hire Flutter developer from a renowned app development company who has an in-depth understanding of different design patterns in Flutter and how to make use of them to address different challenges.
What is the purpose of Design Patterns in Dart?
Design Patterns are used to accelerate the Flutter development process by providing pre-tested and proven development solutions. Using Design Patterns in Dart can help prevent minor issues that could be a major hassle in the later development stages. It also helps improve the overall code readability, especially for Flutter architects with experience using that particular design pattern.
No design pattern is better than the other; different design patterns have different purposes and specializations.
Types of Design Patterns and their relevance
There is a very well perceived and followed design pattern book called The Gang of Four, generally referred to as the GoF book, which was authored by four professionals who titled the book ‘Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Most developers worldwide take this book as the holy grail for design patterns. As per this book, 23 design patterns in Dart are divided into three broad categories. They are –
- Creational Patterns
- Behavioral Patterns
- Structural Patterns
This blog will focus on Creational Design Patterns in Dart Development.
What are Creational Design Patterns in Dart?
Creational patterns are used to control the way objects are created. Creational design patterns deal with the way objects are created; such design patterns are generally used when the developer wants to instantiate a class. At times the form of the thing, if not regulated at creation, results in design problems or makes the project design more complex than need be.
Types of Creational Design Patterns
Here are the top Creational Patterns in Dart –
Abstract Factory Design Pattern
This approach provides Flutter developers with a method to encapsulate individual factories that share a common theme without defining any concrete classes. The purpose of Abstract Factory Pattern is to create a family of objects and keep them in a separate factory object to abstract the process of object creation.
Using the Abstract Factory Design Pattern helps add more flexibility to the object creation process as developers can easily implement and change how objects are created without having to depend on clients. Also, any class can be configured with a factory object.
When to use Abstract Factory Design?
- You need a run-time value to construct any particular dependency
- The client trusts you to decide how to create and compose objects in the system
- Your project has many object families, and these families are designed to be used together
Builder Design Pattern
The Builder Design Pattern in Dart intends to separate complex objects’ construction so that the construction process can be used for creating different representations. This essentially means that the Builder pattern focuses on separating a complex object’s logic from that object’s data.
The purpose of doing so is to adjust the logic of the complex object in different ways to provide a unique final output to your Flutter project. This design pattern in Dart moves the object construction code from its class and puts them in a separate object known as builders.
When to use Builder Factory Design?
- If the process of creating an object is complicated and has multiple parameters
- When there is an extensive list of constructors
- When the client demands different representations for objects that are constructed
Prototype Design Pattern
Prototype is another creational design pattern in Dart that specifies the objects needed for creating a new prototype instance and new things based on the same prototype instance. This pattern is proper when the developer wants to copy an object with a complicated state.
Prototype design pattern provides flexibility at run-time as you can configure a class with a different types of Prototype objects. Such objects can also be dynamically added or removed on run-time.
When to use Prototype Design?
- When object creation is expensive and requires a lot of resources
Factory Method Design Pattern
The Factory Method pattern is also referred to as Virtual Constructor. Its purpose is to define an interface for object creation while giving the subclass the power to control which class gets instantiated. Hence, Factory Method allows a class to hand over the power of instantiation to subclasses.
This is beneficial as you don’t need to develop objects with very inflexible classes. If you develop things with class, you cannot change the object’s instantiation separately from the class as the class commits to a specific object. This pattern helps remove the direct binding of application-specific courses.
When to use Factory Method Design?
- Existing implementation cannot be adapted to new changes easily
- When the initialization is simpler and needs limited parameters
- When execution of the abstract class or interface changes frequently
Singleton Design Pattern
Singleton Pattern is often used throughout software engineering to limit/restrict the instantiation of a class to a single instance. It provides a global access point for this instance.
The basic ideology behind this creational design pattern in Dart is to make a class responsible for managing and tracking its sole instance. There should only be one responsibility bearer for that particular function.
When to use Singleton Method Design?
- For creating expensive resources
- All loggers should be created with Singleton Pattern
- Configuration setting classes of applications
Final Words
These are the top Creational Design Patterns in Dart that can significantly help you optimize your Flutter app performance. Using the correct pattern for the proper purpose is very important. You should hire dedicated developers in Flutter with expertise in design patterns to develop your custom Flutter app solution.
Author Bio
Ronak Patel is a CEO and Founder of Aglowid IT Solutions, an ever-emerging Top Web and Mobile Development company with a motto of turning clients into successful businesses. He believes that Client’s success is company’s success and so that he always makes sure that Aglowid helps their client’s business to reach to its true potential with the help of his best team with the standard development process he set up for the company.
