State Design Pattern

Read the chapter on State design patterns from Head First Design Patterns book.

They explain the GumBallMachine, which can be in different states and needs to perform each action in a different way depending on the current state.

To start with they declare the action() methods in the GumBallMachine class only and in each action method they use if-else ladder to check the current state and take action based on the current state. And show how this type of state machine coding makes the action methods cluttered.

And in the next approach they make a State interface which has list of common action methods. And then there are concrete state classes for each state, which implement this interface and perform the actions() depending on the current state(i.e. the class for the state). This allows you to store the current_state object in the GumBallMachine class and call the state.action() methods inside this class. Depending on the current state the apt methods are called for each action(). This decouples each state from other states and makes adding new states easier.