What is the difference between Builder Design patt

Question

What is the difference between the Builder design pattern and the Factory design pattern?

Which one is more advantageous and why ?

How do I represent my findings as a graph if I want to test and compare/contrast these patterns ?

Answer 1

I believe, the usage of and the difference between Factory & Builder patterns can be understood/clarified easier in a certain time period as you worked on the same code base and changing requirements.

From my experience, usually, you start with a Factory pattern including couple of static creator methods. As your object hierarchy gets more complex (or as you add more types), you probably end up with having your methods populated with more parameters and not to mention you gonna have to recompile your Factory module. All those stuff, increases the complexity of your creator methods, decreases the readability and makes the creation module more fragile.

This point possibly will be the transition point. Transition from Factory to Builder pattern. By doing so, you create a wrapper module around the construction parameters and then you will be able represent new (similar) objects by adding some more abstractions(perhaps) and implementations without touching actual your creation logic. So you've had less complex logic and re-compiled source code

Frankly, referring to something sort of "having an object created in one-step or multiple steps is the difference" as the sole diversity factor was not sufficient for me to distinguish them since I could use both ways for almost all cases I faced up to now without experiencing any benefit. So this is what I've finally thought about it.