Factory is a design pattern, from the creational patterns category used in OOP to create objects without need to specify class full name. In other words without using new function.
The essence of the Factory method Pattern is to define an interface for creating an object and let the classes that implement the interface decide which class to instantiate.
In this article i will make a list with most used five design patterns used in PHP, based on my experience and other observations from IT PHP community.
So in my opinion most used design patterns in PHP are: MVC(Model-View-Controller), Singleton, Registry, Observer, Factory.
Design patterns gained popularity in computer science after release of the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software was published in 1994 by the so-called "Gang of Four", which is frequently abbreviated as "GOF".
The book still can be found for sale in nowadays and in that book was presented first collection of 23 design patterns.
Copyryght © 2012 Magic Software