Chapter 8. Design Patterns and Joomla!
Joomla is an object-oriented application. The Joomla framework has been developed as a series of classes that work together to provide the content management system (CMS) functionality. Developing for Joomla effectively requires that certain object-oriented concepts be understood and adopted. One of these concepts is the use of design patterns for development. Design patterns are essentially conceptual models that direct the way new object-oriented programming is approached.
Design patterns are models that have been refined over many projects so that, if properly matched to the problem that you are trying to solve, can supply a proven effective methodology to solving that problem. Adoption of effective design patterns means that development schedules are easier to keep, maintenance of the system is cheaper, communication about the evolving system is clearer, and new developers will have an easier time programming the system. By following a design pattern, a developer essential avoids reinventing the wheel every time a new project is started.
Since Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides pioneered work in this field in the early 1990s, there have been many comprehensive explanations written. The original (and perhaps most important) book on the subject, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1995), laid the foundations for many of the patterns that are used up to the present ...
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