Composites
Composites are a structural design pattern in software engineering that allows you to compose objects into tree-like structures to represent part-whole hierarchies. This pattern lets clients treat individual objects and compositions of objects uniformly, enabling recursive operations over complex structures. It is commonly used in scenarios like graphical user interfaces, file systems, or organizational hierarchies where elements can be nested.
Developers should learn composites when building systems with hierarchical or tree-like data structures, such as UI components (e.g., menus with submenus), document formats (e.g., XML/HTML elements), or organizational charts. It simplifies code by providing a consistent interface for both leaf and composite objects, reducing complexity and improving maintainability in applications that involve recursive operations.