Please, gurus, give me a detailed explanation of, in the Object-Oriented programming world, what is lightweight object? And in other computer science fields, what does lightweight means then? Is lightweight a design pattern? Is lightweight good, is bad?
There are many meanings for lightweight, but normally it means the object which has less amount of data or which process less amount of data. Sometimes a thread is called as a lightweight process as it does a less things than a process do. Its processing is also fast than the process. A lightweight object is one which has less amount members and which are of basic types (int, float) as member variables. A light function is the one which does very less things compared to others. Normally these are inline functions. (in C context).
There is no such patterns as lightweight pattern. But Normally the systems should be consists of lightweight objects so that the maintaining those objects could be easy.
The advantages are simple debugging, maintenance and easy understanding of code. The disadvantage could be lots of objects.
There is no lightweight pattern as such but the term is fairly used in the industry.