So: now it's time to talk about Factories. Factories! Lots and lots of Factory patterns. And no XML.

In this episode we'll introduce three patterns in the family of factories. Factories! Lots of factories! And no XML.

First, we'll talk about Abstract Factory. We'll show you why and when you'll want to use it, and what interesting little traps to watch out for. And that will start us on a lovely discussion about independent deployability, component design, jar files, type safety, type wars, smalltalk, Java, Eclipse, and no XML!

Then we'll talk even more about the Factory Method and Prototype Patterns, and we'll discuss the problem of initialization. And we'll talk more about type safety, language wars, C vs. Pascal, C++ vs. C, Java vs. C++, Smalltalk and Ruby, and NO NO NO XML!!

Because, we don't want to talk about XML. You heard me right: NO XML! I don't want to hear about XML. I mean, for goodness sake, what were those guys thinking? XML was not a language that was designed for people to write! It was just a convenient syntax for a binary representation. You know, like X400, and X209, and... What the bleeping bleep were those XSLT guys thinking?? Or those ANT guys. And don't even get me started about Maven! Sheesh, angle brackets everywhere, and I mean, who the... It just makes me nuts that anybody would try to use XML for anything other than just looking at a data stream. I mean, writing XML? WRITING XML???? That's just nuts, nuts, nuts. It's nuts, I tell you! It's crazy, kookie, outright nuts in the worm hole, and I don't know what to tell you: these angle brackets are everywhere like little paperclips, like little spider legs, crawling, crawling up my spine and down my legs, and I just can't tolerate them all over me anymore and—