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oopdesign-patternsgranularity

Meaning of granularity in OOP

I was reading about the flyweight design pattern on this page.
I was not able to understand the meaning of the "granularity" in the context of programming languages or the design pattern.

Can anyone please explain, an example would be great.

Solution

  • Granularity is a level of details. Granular objects are those, which are at low level detail in your program. Consider:

    • trees in game landscape
    • characters in document
    • seats in cinema
    • power points in cad application

    Usually you have many granular objects in application. If you will create separate object for each tree/character/seat/power-point it could be very memory-consuming. Thats the problem which is solved by Flyweight pattern.