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You're reading from  Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inAug 2015
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781784398781
Edition1st Edition
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Author (1)
Dusty Phillips
Dusty Phillips
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Dusty Phillips

Dusty Phillips is a Canadian software developer and an author currently living in New Brunswick. He has been active in the open-source community for 2 decades and has been programming in Python for nearly as long. He holds a master's degree in computer science and has worked for Facebook, the United Nations, and several startups.
Read more about Dusty Phillips

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The observer pattern


The observer pattern is useful for state monitoring and event handling situations. This pattern allows a given object to be monitored by an unknown and dynamic group of "observer" objects.

Whenever a value on the core object changes, it lets all the observer objects know that a change has occurred, by calling an update() method. Each observer may be responsible for different tasks whenever the core object changes; the core object doesn't know or care what those tasks are, and the observers don't typically know or care what other observers are doing.

Here, it is in UML:

An observer example

The observer pattern might be useful in a redundant backup system. We can write a core object that maintains certain values, and then have one or more observers create serialized copies of that object. These copies might be stored in a database, on a remote host, or in a local file, for example. Let's implement the core object using properties:

class Inventory:
    def __init__(self):
 ...
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Python 3 Object-Oriented Programming - Second Edition
Published in: Aug 2015Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781784398781

Author (1)

author image
Dusty Phillips

Dusty Phillips is a Canadian software developer and an author currently living in New Brunswick. He has been active in the open-source community for 2 decades and has been programming in Python for nearly as long. He holds a master's degree in computer science and has worked for Facebook, the United Nations, and several startups.
Read more about Dusty Phillips