Object oriented programming involves instances of classes i.e objects interacting with one another towards a common goal. This interaction can be for services, control or data. Objects perform a particular function in a software. When there are a lot of objects the code becomes cumbersome to maintain and use; every time in the same piece of software.
Facade pattern comes into action when you have a subsystem that performs a particular service for another subsystem or part of the code. A subsystem here in terms of software code means a group of objects interacting to get a job done. Facade pattern hides the objects underneath it and their interactions to object layers above the pattern. For example, information collected from the user interface in a java application may be used to create say, a user object, account object and the user interface may store this to the database by using an object that performs that database operation. Here a Facade object can expose an operation, i.e creating the objects from the data from UI and storing it to the database. This facade can be used by the UI without delving into the details of how it is done.
If the interaction of the objects in the facade changes, it is contained within the facade and no layer of code outside the facade is affected. This is the most important aspect of the facade pattern that makes it so useful in Java Enterprise where this pattern is more frequently seen in popular Java Enterprise IDE's ready-made-code.
For example, suppose there is a table in the database that stores the details of attendees in a conference. Java enterprise wraps this with an Entity say, Attendee entity which would be part of the JPA ready-made-code. This entity will expose the database operations on the table. A facade would be created namely a session facade which exposes operations that are utilised by controller layers to update information. The session facade will deal with the requests on the Attendee Entity.
Here is an example of the code structure for a Tomcat based application that gets information in a table. Called from a servlet. i.e servlet is the controller in Model-View-Controller Application model.
as you can see from this code, the facade is called to do the job. The code to get a job done becomes small as far a controller object is concerned. A lot of things may happen under the facade but, the higher layer object does not care about this. It is the Facade's responsibility. The code structure in eclipse web project is shown below. There are entity objects and Facade objects. Facade objects here share a common ancestor which declares common operations on entity-facades. In this example, entity objects simulate the JPA entity objects.
The abstract facade is not a must in the general facade pattern but, is used here as is further simplifies code with inheritance. A part of abstract facade is shown here
A subclass of this called Attendee Facade used in our example is here
A lot of object interactions and code is thus abstracted from a controller object / higher level object by using the Facade Pattern. It also makes the code more reusable, maintainable, predictable and beautiful.
