What is the difference between the template method and the strategy patterns?

Question

Can someone please explain to me what is the difference between the template method pattern and the strategy pattern is?

As far as I can tell they are 99% the same -

Answer 1

I would suggest you to read this article. It explains the differences on a real case example.

Quote from the article

"As one can see implementing classes also depend upon the template method class. This dependency causes to change the template method if one wants to change some of the steps of the algorithm. On the other side strategy completely encapsulates the algorithm. it gives the implementing classes to completely define an algorithm. Therefore if any change arrives one does need to change the code for previously written classes. This was the primary reason I choose strategy for designing up the classes.

One feature of template method is that template method controls the algorithm. Which can be a good thing in other situation but in my problem this was restricting me to design the classes. On the other side strategy does not control the steps of an algorithm which enables me to add completely different conversion methods. Hence in my case strategy helps me for implementation.

One drawback of strategy is that there is too much code redundancy and less code sharing. As it is obvious in the presented example of this article I have to repeat the same code in four classes again and again. Therefore it is hard to maintain because if the implementation of our system such as step 4 which is common to all is changed then I will have to update this in all 5 classes. On the other side, in template method, I can only change the superclass and the changes are reflected into the sub classes. Therefore template method gives a very low amount of redundancy and high amount of code sharing among the classes.

Strategy also allows changing the algorithm at run-time. In template method one will have to re-initialize the object. This feature of strategy provide large amount of flexibility. From design point of view one has to prefer composition over inheritance. Therefore using strategy pattern also became the primary choice for development."