I think this pattern was popularised in the Design Patterns book (Gama et al). But my guess it's a natural progression from a standard Factory; Factories allow

I think this pattern was popularised in the Design Patterns book (Gama et al). But my guess it's a natural progression from a standard Factory; Factories allow instantiation without specifying any type, and FactoryFactories afford the same flexibility, but just for instantiating a Factory without knowing it's type. This was probably reenforced by the fact that life was easier if you built to interfaces rather than implementations, so factories were good for this. I actually love the design patterns book, but I sometimes curse it - especially when stumbling upon things like the AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean. WTF! http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/2.5.x/api/org/springframework/aop/framework/AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean.html http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/2.5.x/api/org/springframew...