What Is an Observer Pattern?
The Observer pattern facilitates communication between a parent class and any dependent child classes, allowing changes to the state of the parent class to be sent to the dependent child classes. We can use this pattern to allow the state changes in a class to be sent to all its dependent classes. The class relationship is one-to-many between the class and all its dependents.
The pattern generally consists of two base classes. The first is called the Subject class, and this class acts as the notification engine. The Observer classes act as receivers of the subject notifications. From these two base class types the concrete implementations for each type are derived: concrete subject and concrete observer.
Observers generally monitor the state of a class they are linked to and get information from that class when changes occur that they are concerned about. If we had a class that linked into many classes, and those classes wished to know about changes within it, we might use this pattern. The pattern allows code to handle the notifications automatically through the structure of the objects, instead of letting oolean logic decide. It also offers a cleaner and more intuitive way to allow communication between a single object supplying notifications and its dependent objects.
Comparison to Similar Patterns
I would say the main difference between Observer and Mediator patterns is how the objects communicate. In the Observer pattern, one object communicates with many linked objects. In the Mediator, objects in a group communicate on a one-to-one basis between each other without referencing each other. Observer subjects and singletons both pass values from a single object to many other objects. Observers use the state of the subject object and gain that state as a linked object. Observers use the state like a Memento pattern, storing parts of the state of the subject.
What We Have Learned
Observers are interesting ways to allow a one-to-many relationship for passing and sharing state between a subject and a number of observer objects. It allows an automatic relationship to be established between a subject and its observers that allows controlled information to be exchanged at key moments between these objects.