What is the difference between Factory and Strategy patterns?

Question

Can any one explain the difference between factory and strategy patterns?

For me both are looking same other than an extra factory class (which create an object of

Answer 1

First of all a difference between simple factory and abstract factory must be made. The first one is a simple factory where you only have one class which acts as a factory for object creation, while in the latter you connect to an factory interface (which defines the method names) and then call the different factories that implement this interface which are supposed to have different implementations of the same method based on some criteria. For example, we have a ButtonCreationFactory interface, which is implemented by two factories, the first WindowsButtonCreationFactory (creates buttons with Windows look and feel) and the second LinuxButtonCreationFactory (creates buttons with Linux look and feel). So both these factories do have the same creation method with different implementations (algorithms). You can reference this in runtime based on the method that you type of button that you want.

For example if you want buttons with Linux look and feel:

ButtonCreationFactory myFactory = new LinuxButtonCreationFactory();
Button button1 = myFactory.createButton(...);

or if you want Windows buttons

ButtonCreationFactory myFactory = new WindowsButtonCreationFactory();
Button button1 = myFactory.createButton(...);

Exactly in this case, it results in a kind of strategy pattern, since it differentiates algorithms for doing some creation. However, it differs from it semantically because it is used for OBJECT CREATION rather than operational algorithms. So, basically with abstract factory you have object creation using different strategies, which makes it very similar to the strategy pattern. However the AbstractFactory is creational, while the Strategy pattern is operational. Implementation wise, they result to be the same.