Software design patterns are reusable solutions to common problems.
The seminal books on design patterns are Design Patterns by the “Gang of Four” and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.
Notable patterns related to web development:
- ActiveRecord Model: an object corresponding to a record in the database, along with all the operations necessary to make changes to it in the database.
- Command: store a request as an object, so that different operations can be done to it, including queueing, logging, etc.
- Decorator: wraps an object with another object of the same interface, to add additional functionality.
- Domain Model: objects that represent busines entities and operations, but are unrelated to database persistence.
- Event: a mechanism for notifying other objects (“listeners”) of things that happen in this object.
- Form Object: an object that corresponds directly to fields on a form, which may not directly correspond to the fields in the database. For example, a form may have fields from two different database tables.
- Presenter: a representation of the data to be displayed in a view. Allows removing almost all logic from the view.
- Queued Jobs: records a request to do a task to be done separately from the user’s request/response cycle.
- Serializer: handles transforming an object into another representation, such as JSON.
- Service Object: performs a single business operation, independently of a web user interface or database persistence.