Wrapper facade: a structural pattern for encapsulated functions within classes

Abstract

This paper describes the Wrapper Facade pattern. The intent of this pattern is to encapsulate low-level functions and data structures with object-oriented (OO) class interfaces. Common examples of the Wrapper Facade pattern are class libraries like MFC, ACE, and AWT that encapsulate native OS C APIs, such as sockets, pthreads, or GUI functions. Programming directly to native OS C APIs makes networking applications verbose, non-robust, non-portable, and hard to maintain because it exposes many low-level, errorprone details to application developers. This paper illustrates how the Wrapper Facade pattern can help to make these types of applications more concise, robust, portable, and maintainable. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the Wrapper Facade pattern in detail using the Siemens format [1] and Section 3 presents concluding remarks.