a) ?
b) OO will allow the different type of documents to be handled easily because it is possible to have similar functions be programmed in one part, or class, and document specific functions in subclasses. The problems can be broken down into parts and integrated easily, which is good because there will be many people working on this project. Once done, many of these programmed parts will be reusable for later projects. Matt Quigley
a)
The Abstract Factory would be a particularly useful pattern to use here. Because.... You have a hierarchy of objects and you need to frequently create different objects from that hierarchy. Rather than hard coding the individual classes why not let the program just talk to an abstract class that is the super class of all these documents and allow it to return the correct object based on what criteria (data) the user wants to put in them.
Hey am i remembering wrong or were there lecture slides to Design Patterns, I can't seem to find them and I would love for someone to point me in the right direction, my notes a skimpy on this one. Robert Schierholz
In response to Jason Fulghum:
I thought that in an Abstract Factory you had an Abstract Factor class, say DocumentCreatorAbstract, which was subclassed by an actual Factor, say DocumentCreator. This class would take in the satellite data and return the appropriate class. However the classes that it returns would not be in the hiearchy of DocumentCreatorAbstract. They would be in the hierarchy of another class say Document. Any other thoughts on this. Design Patterns are not my strong point. Jared Parsons
