After discussing creational design patterns in the last post, let’s go over structural design patterns.
Adapter: One of the most common structural patterns that helps two incompatible components talk to each other. For example, for a caller that communicates in JSON, but the provider service only understands XML, an adapter helps in this situation.
Composite: To manage the cases where there can be a cyclic relationship between objects, for example, a Manager himself is an Employee, and at the same time Manager has a relationship (manages) other employees.
Facade: Hide complex implementation details from the caller, which calls the facade. The facade layer then communicates with various other implementing components and returns the final response back.
Proxy: A common pattern hiding the actual implementation from the caller client. The client calls the proxy class or proxy layer, which in turn communicates with implementing component.
Bridge: The pattern that helps decouple an abstraction from its implementation.
Flyweight: The flyweight pattern helps reuse objects where ever possible and only creates a new object if the object is not available.
It sounds a bit overlapping with the object pool pattern, but there are significant differences. An object pool is a creational pattern whereas flyweight is a structural pattern. Object pool makes sure objects of the same type are pooled, whereas flyweight takes care of different object implementations, stored as a singleton.
Example: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/design_pattern/flyweight_pattern.htm
Decorator: The core component is decorated or enhanced by additional decorator features on the fly.
Example: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/design_pattern/decorator_pattern.htm
