The bridge pattern is a design pattern used in software engineering which is meant to "decouple an abstraction from its implementation so that the two can vary independently". The bridge uses encapsulation, aggregation, and can use inheritance to separate responsibilities into different classes.
When a class varies often, the features of object-oriented programming become very useful because changes to a program's code can be made easily with minimal prior knowledge about the program. The bridge pattern is useful when both the class as well as what it does vary often. The class itself can be thought of as the implementation and what the class can do as the abstraction. The bridge pattern can also be thought of as two layers of abstraction.
The bridge pattern is often confused with the adapter pattern. In fact, the bridge pattern is often implemented using the class "adapter pattern", e.g. in the Java code below.
Variant: The implementation can be decoupled even more by deferring the presence of the implementation to the point where the abstraction is utilized.
Read more about Bridge Pattern: Structure
Famous quotes containing the words bridge and/or pattern:
“Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.”
—Audre Lorde (1934–1992)
“The real trouble about women is that they must always go on trying to adapt themselves to men’s theories of women, as they always have done. When a woman is thoroughly herself, she is being what her type of man wants her to be. When a woman is hysterical it’s because she doesn’t quite know what to be, which pattern to follow, which man’s picture of woman to live up to.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)