Design Patterns - Composite Pattern

Introduction

A design pattern is a specific way of solving a particular problem. They are not simply about reusing code; they are more abstract and generalized than that. They are about using reusing ideas.

Composite Pattern

The next figure shows the general case for the composite:

The composite pattern has two parts: the Component abstract class and the Composite, which is a concrete implementation of the Component class. All Composite objects descend from the abstract Component class. Any Component can contain other Components. A Component with no children can be thought of as an empty Composite.

Moving back from the general case, it will be necessary to make a change in the design and switch the Instrument interface to an abstract class. Interfaces and abstract classes are similar because neither one can be used directly to instantiate an object. The key difference is that an abstract class can have some fully implemented methods, whereas interfaces just have method declarations.

All text and images above is from the book:"Professional PHP5" ISBN: 0-7645-7282-2 (Lecky-Thompson et al., 2005)