Abstract

Reusability is a technique used to unify the abstract representation of real world entities. In object-oriented design and programming, inheritance mechanism plays an important role in software reusability. The Decorator Design Pattern (DDP), invented by GoF, was an alternative solution to the inheritance mechanism. It uses the concept of decorating objects instead of inheritance. The aim of this study is to present the DDP, showing its advantages and disadvantages and offer a new innovative approach, called Decorator Pattern Approach (DPA), in order to improve the structure and implementation of DDP. The main objective of DPA is to provide a way to separate, dynamically, the decorating objects from the objects to decorate.

Keywords:

Decorator, design pattern, Decorator Pattern Approach (DPA), inheritance, Object Oriented Design (OOD), reusability,

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Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

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The authors have no competing interests.