Class clusters are a design pattern that the Foundation framework makes extensive use of. Class clusters group a number of private concrete subclasses under a public abstract superclass. The grouping of classes in this way simplifies the publicly visible architecture of an object-oriented framework without reducing its functional richness. Class clusters are based on the Abstract Factory design pattern.


Class factory methods are implemented by a class as a convenience for clients. They combine allocation and initialization in one step and return the created object. However, the client receiving this object does not own the object and thus (per the object-ownership policy) is not responsible for releasing it. These methods are of the form + (type)className... (where className excludes any prefix).