Recently, when speaking to some of my colleagues, I have noticed a lot of confusion between these two design patterns. Thus, today I'm going to clarify all the doubts :).
First off, both Proxy and Adapter belong to the same group of design patterns – structural one. What are structural design patterns? In simple words, they are patterns that describe ways of combining different entities with each other and thus forming larger structures.
And now a definition from Wikipedia:
“Structural design patterns are design patterns that ease the design by identifying a simple way to realize relationships between entities.”
Right. First we will scrutinize the adapter pattern. In a nutshell, it transforms an interface of one class into the interface that is expected. It enables two classes to work together even though their interfaces are not compatible with each other. There are two basic variations of the adapter design pattern: class adapter and object adapter.
- Class adapter.
In this case, the adapter's class subclasses the class we want to adapt and in the same time it implements the desired interface that the client expects. When the call is made, appropriate inherited methods are being invoked.
- Object adapter.
On the other hand, in the object adapter, the adapter's class does not subclass the adaptee but instead it holds a reference to it (composition). It also implements the expected interface.
There are pros and cons of each of these versions but in this article lets focus on more general concepts of the adapter pattern.
Now, what about the proxy pattern?
In general, it provides a surrogate of a given object in order to control the access to it in some way. Based on the way of controlling the access we can distinguish different types of proxy design pattern:
- Remote proxy – it handles the interaction between remote objects.
- Virtual proxy – it handles the situation when an object is expensive to create (lazy initialization).
- Protection proxy - based on who calls the proxy, it controls the access to different methods.
- Smart proxy – adds some extra operations when the objects is accessed.
Very important thing about the proxy pattern is the fact that the surrogate has the same interface as the real object.
To summarize. The adapter bridges the gap between two classes that are not compatible with each other. The proxy provides a surrogate to control the access to the real object.
