Flyweight

Flyweight pattern is primarily used to reduce the number of objects created and to decrease memory footprint and increase performance. This type of design pattern comes under structural pattern as this pattern provides ways to decrease object count thus improving the object structure of application.

Flyweight pattern tries to reuse already existing similar kind objects by storing them and creates new object when no matching object is found. We will demonstrate this pattern by drawing 20 circles of different locations but we will create only 5 objects. Only 5 colors are available so color property is used to check already existing Circle objects.



Flyweight in Java recognizable by creational methods returning a cached instance

• java.lang.Integer#valueOf(int) (also on Boolean, Byte, Character, Short, Long and BigDecimal)

public interface Shape {
   void draw();
}

public class Circle implements Shape {
   private String color;
   private int x;
   private int y;
   private int radius;

   public Circle(String color){
      this.color = color;		
   }

   public void setX(int x) {
      this.x = x;
   }

   public void setY(int y) {
      this.y = y;
   }

   public void setRadius(int radius) {
      this.radius = radius;
   }

   @Override
   public void draw() {
      System.out.println("Circle: Draw() [Color : " + color +
		", x : " + x + ", y :" + y + ", radius :" + radius);
   }
}

import java.util.HashMap;

public class ShapeFactory {
   private static final HashMap<String, Shape> circleMap = new HashMap();

   public static Shape getCircle(String color) {
      Circle circle = (Circle)circleMap.get(color);

      if(circle == null) {
         circle = new Circle(color);
         circleMap.put(color, circle);
         System.out.println("Creating circle of color : " + color);
      }
      return circle;
   }
}

public class FlyweightPatternDemo {
   private static final String colors[] = { "Red", "Green", "Blue", "White", "Black" };
   public static void main(String[] args) {

      for(int i=0; i < 20; ++i) {
         Circle circle = (Circle)ShapeFactory.getCircle(getRandomColor());
         circle.setX(getRandomX());
         circle.setY(getRandomY());
         circle.setRadius(100);
         circle.draw();
      }
   }
   private static String getRandomColor() {
      return colors[(int)(Math.random()*colors.length)];
   }
   private static int getRandomX() {
      return (int)(Math.random()*100 );
   }
   private static int getRandomY() {
      return (int)(Math.random()*100);
   }
}