Factory method pattern

Often, we find that some classes have common features (behavior) and can be considered classes of the same family. For example, multiple payment classes represent a family of payment services. Credit card, debit card, and net banking are some of the examples of payment classes that have common methods, such as makePayment, authorizePayment, and so on. Using the factory method pattern, we can develop controller classes, which can use these payment services, without knowing the actual payment type at design time.

Note

The factory method pattern is a creational design pattern used to create objects of classes from the same family without knowing the exact class name at design time.

Using the factory method pattern, classes can be instantiated from the common factory method. The advantage of using this pattern is that it delegates the creation of an object to another class and provides a good level of abstraction.

Let's learn this pattern using the following...