What is the naming convention for the Factory Method?

Question

Introduction

The MacApp Macintosh application framework [App89] always declares the abstract operation that defines the factory method as Class* DoMakeClass(), where Class is the Product class.

This quote has leaded me to the question about naming conventions for the Factory Method design pattern.

Expectations

I expect to see best practices or helpful examples, which provide clear factory methods naming.

Since it could depend on a language, let's consider a set of the most popular languages: C#, Java, C++ and JavaScript.

Context

For a context I propose to consider the following class structure. We have two abstract classes: Document and Application. The Application contains a list of documents and it should be possible to create a new document. The Application has a factory method CreateDocument().

Thanks

Answer 1

IMHO, the method name is dependent on context and the nature of the object being created. Maybe this is why you've not found any clear conventions. For example, a Create() method might be right in one context while Open() or Build() might be more appropriate in others.

Answer 2

There are no strong conventions related to this design pattern. The best practice would be using of "Do" or "Make" prefixes to mark a factory method in some languages, which have not embedded virtual or abstract methods (for example, javascript).