What exactly is a Class Factory?

Question

I see the word thrown around often, and I may have used it myself in code and libraries over time, but I never really got it. In most write-ups I came across, they just went on expecting you to figure it out.

What is a Class Factory? Can someone explain the concept?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2526879/what-exactly-is-a-class-factory

Answer 1

A class factory constructs instances of other classes. Typically, the classes they create share a common base class or interface, but derived classes are returned.

For example, you could have a class factory that took a database connection string and returned a class implementing IDbConnection such as SqlConnection (class and interface from .Net)