Are design patterns silver bullets?

I hate text books thicker than half an inch. These books are, first hard to read, hard to understand. I am a man who will do it and understand it rather than read it and understand it. But today I decided to read and do and tried to understand. The object in question was a Frame Work which allowed me to build a SQLite based guestbook using MVC pattern, oops!, MVC Design Pattern. #-o

The question is do I really need to code more than 3 pages to develope a guestbook?

My answer is, no. Ofcourse you dont need a abstract knife factory which will give you a factory method that will let you create a kitchen knife to cut vegetables. I simply want to cut a piece of vegetable, say want to chop an onion to cook my ultimate Indian gravy dish. I need a knife. Now there are hell lot of knives in kitchen. Butcher knife, Kitchen knife, Chef’s knife and this and that and oh my god so many knives. So if I am planning to cook chicken dish I will need a butcher knife but also a kitchen knife to chop onions, green chillies and other stuff. So we have a abstract knife factory. Which in turn owns a factory method which in turns gives me an appropriate knife at the last momentdepending on what I am going to chopor cut.


Come to procedural approach. I will develop a library of knives or say a knives holder. I will stack all my knives here and will pick up the knife which I need or say call the function whichever I need.

Aren’t design patterns leading to bloats or sometimes they turn into an overkill or…?

Are design patterns silver bullets?

Design Patterns – Is Singleton pattern evil?

To hell with everything. Why the hell use singleton or even why the hell it is described as a pattern by GOF?

I don’t know. I have been reading, studying and even trying to code and use the same design patterns in real life. The very first and easy to understand pattern is Singleton. This pattern was defined/recognised/identified as a pattern which assures creation of one and only object throughout the life cycle of a program. Common or say classic example given is error logging mechanism. And that’s the only real world example. Rest of the examples such as file or database handles are not suitable examples. They can be said as good example but not perfect.

Why singleton is evil?

I don’t want to reinvent wheel. There are n number of reasons. The reason I found is, tight coupling. Coupling in OOPS or even Software Development is discouraged. Loosely coupled systems allow more robust testing. You can replace the modules with dummy modules, equivalent modules and test the system. In this scenario a file logging mechanism is a perfect example of singleton pattern. The mechanism can be file logger, database logger or any other logger and will not affect our system if we replace it. Coz its not tightly coupled to system. Or as I read some where it simply “gets” the information and doesn’t “set” anything in our system. On the other side a database layer can’t be singleton pattern. What if I replace my MySQL layer with PGSQL? The system may not perform as expected or worst may break.

I suggest using singleton pattern shamelessly if your system is going to be a very tightly coupled and is custom and specific to a requirement. My argument is performance counts more than portability. Ofcourse Bullet 350 is no match to Splendor and Splendor is no match to Bullet 350. So, singletons are evil but so is fire, if you use it to burn your neighbour’s house. Use fire to light up. Use singleton wisely. 🙂

Interfaces versus Abstract classes in PHP

Interfaces and abstract classes are similar because neither one can be used directly to instantiate an object. The key difference is that an abstract class can have some fully implemented methods, whereas interfaces just have method declarations. Use abstract classes when you want to maintain the same methods in all your subclasses but have some general functionality that can be shared by the subclasses. Use interfaces when the implementations will differ across most or all the methods in subclasses.

Edited on 12th December @ 13:00 Hrs
More differences are as follows:



  • Neither Abstract classes or Interface can be instantiated.

Edited (again :-/ ) on 16th Dec @ 16:40 Hours IST

When to use what?

  • Use Abstract class for creating a bond between similar items like Splendor and Bullet 350 are similar entities, motor bikes, so extend them from abstract class like Bike.
  • Use interface for creating a bond between dissimilar items like Splendor and Civic are different from Bike but both are vehicles, have engine, have mileage, have wheels, consume fuel, and so many common behaviors.
  • Always try to use Abstract class or interface whenever you need to up-cast them to achieve simplicity e.g. accelerate and brake methods of bikes.

(not so) Short and (but still) sweet. 🙂