Observer pattern

The observer pattern is a software design pattern in which an object, called the subject, maintains a list of its dependents, called observers, and notifies them automatically of any state changes, usually by calling one of their methods.

It is mainly used to implement distributed event handling systems, in "event driven" software. Most modern languages such as Java and C# have built in "event" constructs which implement the observer pattern components, for easy programming and short code.

The observer pattern is also a key part in the familiar model–view–controller (MVC) architectural pattern. The observer pattern is implemented in numerous programming libraries and systems, including almost all GUI toolkits.

The observer pattern can cause memory leaks, known as the lapsed listener problem, because in basic implementation it requires both explicit registration and explicit deregistration, as in the dispose pattern, because the subject holds strong references to the observers, keeping them alive. This can be prevented by the subject holding weak references to the observers.

Typically, the observer pattern is implemented with the "subject" (which is being "observed") being part of the object whose state change is being observed, to be communicated to the observers upon occurrence. This type of implementation is considered "tightly coupled", forcing both the observers and the subject to be aware of each other and have access to their internal parts, creating possible issues of scalability, speed, message recovery and maintenance (also called event or notification loss), the lack of flexibility in conditional dispersion and possible hindrance to desired security measures. In some (non-polling) implementations of the publish-subscribe pattern (also called the pub-sub pattern), this is solved by creating a dedicated "message queue" server and at times an extra "message handler" object, as added stages between the observer and the observed object who's state is being checked, thus "decoupling" the software components. In these cases, the message queue server is accessed by the observers with the observer pattern, "subscribing to certain messages" knowing only about the expected message (or not, in some cases), but knowing nothing about the message sender itself, and the sender may know nothing about the receivers. Other implementations of the publish-subscribe pattern, which achieve a similar effect of notification and communication to interested parties, do not use the observer pattern altogether.

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