Design patterns have evolved to solve problems often encountered in software applications. The factory method design pattern and the abstract factory design pattern are both creational patterns ...

The first design pattern I ever used was the Factory Method pattern. By adopting that pattern, I moved the code for creating my objects out of my constructors and into a separate method.

In essence, the Abstract Factory design pattern is used to create a factory of factories. In the Abstract Factory design pattern, the consumer invokes the Factory methods to create the objects.