Website Design Patterns

Website Design Patterns are essential for web developers, helping them to overcome daily development challenges. These design patterns offer guidelines, to prevent User Interface(UI) errors and also help the developers to create efficient, scalable, maintainable, and reliable web applications. These patterns offer a valuable framework for web developers to solve common challenges they face while designing.

Types of Website Design Patterns

The various website design patterns used in web development include:

1. Model-View-Controller Pattern

MVC design patterns are used to separate the application into three logical components i.e. Model, View, and Controller. It contains Model(business logic), View(user interface), and Controller(intermediate between Model and View). This separation enhances the code’s maintainability, flexibility, and readability.

For example

In web applications, the Model represents(e.g., user information), the View represents the web page view for users and the Controller handles the user requests.

2. Front Controller Pattern

The front controller design pattern involves directing all the incoming requests for the application’s resource through a central handler, which dispatches them to a specific request handler. To facilitate the dispatching process, this central handler may make use of additional auxiliary components.

• Controller :- The controller serves as an entry point for managing all the incoming requests.
• View :- A view represents and displays the information to the user.
• Dispatcher :- It is like a traffic manager for a web application.
• Helper :- It helps the view and controller to complete their processes.

For example

A PHP front controller script managing all the incoming HTTP requests.

3. Dependency Injection (DI) Pattern

Dependency Injection (DI) Pattern is used to implement inversion of control(IOC). It is just like ordering the pizza rather than making it from scratch. Instead of creating a class, you provide specific parts(dependencies) from the outside. In simple terms, rather than creating a specific tool itself, it uses the existing tools to do its jobs. In a website, DI can be used to inject the services, such as database connection, into the controller.

For example

Injection a database connection into a web applications.

4. Repository Pattern

The repository design pattern provides a way to manage data access layer in a centralized location. It acts as a librarian, keeping data retrieval and mapping separate from the client business logic, resulting in more clean and manageable and organized code. Its purpose is to specify the data access layer and enhance the application architecture.

For example

Managing a database for “user” entity in a web application.

5. Middleware Pattern

Middleware Pattern acts as a chain of components that handles the requests and responses in web development. It’s a set of intermediates that perform tasks like authentication, login, and data transformer between the server and the application, it enhances the application maintainability and functionality. It sits between the server and the application.

For example

Authentication, logging, and data transformation in web applications.

6. Template Method Pattern

The template method pattern sets a blueprint for an algorithm or as a skeleton of operations, but leaves the details implemented by the child classes. This pattern sets a common structure/architecture for the web pages but allows specific pages to implement the unique content in their web pages as their own. This is a simple pattern to grasp and widely used pattern for web development to avoid duplicacy.

For example

Structuring web pages with customization content.

7. Singleton pattern

Singleton pattern is one of the simplest design patterns in Java. This type of design pattern comes under creational pattern as this pattern provides one of the best ways to create an object. This patterns ensures that a class has only one instance and provide a global point of access to it. This class offers direct access to its unique object, eliminating the need to create an instance of the class.

For example

Configuration manager and logging service in web applications.

8. Observer Pattern

The observer pattern is a behavioral design pattern that enable a subscription mechanism to inform multiple objects about event occurring in the object they are observing. It establishes a one-to-one relationship between objects. In web development, it’s useful for handling events, like informing multiple components when there’s a data change.

For example

Event changing in web application, notify multiple components of data changes.

9. RESTful Design Patterns

RESTful design patterns are structural principles for creating RESTful web services. An important approach is to use HTTP methods (like GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) for basic data operations on resources, resulting in straightforward and easy-to-use API endpoints.

For example

Using HTTP methods perform CRUD operation in web applications.

10. Caching Pattern

The caching pattern helps save resources by not immediately releasing them after use. Instead, resources are stored in a fast-access storage, maintaining their identity and allowing for re-use, which avoids the costly process of re-acquisition.

For example

Caching frequently accessed database query result to enhance web application performance.

Conclusion

These design patterns assist web developers in efficiently addressing common issues, serving as a basis for building web applications that are easy to maintain and can scale effectively. Properly applying these patterns ensures that websites are sturdy, perform well, and remain manageable over time.