Design patterns

[Freddie]

I have readen the book "Thinking in Pattern "(Bruce Eckel) and I dont understand the factory pattern
can you explain me?
because I searched in internet but I still dont understand

I need an example
please help me
Freddy

[fritz]

The factory pattern lets you create different kinds of objects. I may have a dinnerFactory that returns dinner objects. Depending on what i pass it, it may return a pizzaDinner, a steakDinner, or a hamburgerDinner object - all of which are sub-classes of the Dinner class.

[goldhouse]

Let me add some thing more , There is one more pattern called abstractfactory which is an extention of this. Say in the above example we have fixed the factory as dinner factory but consider a situation in which it can be either dinner facotory or a supper factory In that case we use the abstract factory