Decorator Pattern
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The Decorator pattern lets you maintain the main structure of your web site, yet allows you to "decorate" your application's different components. This article, the first of a six-part series, introduces you to its use. It is excerpted from chapter four of
ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns Object Oriented Programming Techniques, written by William B. Sanders and Chandima Cumaranatunge (O'Reilly, 2007 ISBN: 0596528469). Copyright © 2007 O'Reilly Media, Inc. All rights reserved. Used with permission from the publisher. Available from booksellers or direct from O'Reilly Media.
I try to decorate my imagination as much as I can.
—Franz Schubert
Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.
—William Wordsworth (Poet and a guy who really understood bandwidth)
What Is the Decorator Pattern? The Decorator pattern wasn’t developed with a web designer or developer in mind, but it could well have been. A few years back, we developed a web site and were cognizant that periodically we’d have to update it. The design was set up so that substitution of one element for an updated one was fairly simple, and it required no major change in the code or structure. Because we didn’t have to update it too often, this wasn’t much of a problem. However, had we needed to update elements or features on a fairly regular basis, our design would have left a good deal to be desired.
Imagining situations where you need to update or change certain parts of a web site on a regular basis isn’t difficult. If your client is a retailer with regular advertising such as weekly specials and new products introduced periodically, you want to have flexibility in your web design and structure. You may want to use features of your basic structure that assure change is easily accommodated, but you don’t have to alter the basic structure itself in any way.
The Decorator pattern addresses the issue of maintaining the structure while having the ability to make changes by decorating the different components that make up the application. The decorations are composed of descriptions and/or methods used to wrap different objects in the application. As you will see, this design pattern allows you to mix and match all the different components and decorations to optimize flexibility and expandability, while core structure classes remain unaltered.
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 This article is excerpted from chapter four of ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns Object Oriented Programming Techniques, written by William B. Sanders and Chandima Cumaranatunge (O'Reilly, 2007 ISBN: 0596528469). Check it out today at your favorite bookstore. Buy this book now.
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