On the StarTutorial.com site, they've posted the latest in their article series covering design patterns and their implementation in PHP. In this latest tutorial they cover the simple factory pattern. To help illustrate the point of the pattern they use an example of a toy company with an ever-expanding line of toys.

Dragon Inc. is one of the top toy manufacturers in China. In fact, they're a pioneer in toy manufacturing. They started production at a time when few toys were being produced commercially. Hence, they dominated the market and became the leader in the toy production industry.

The initial version of their produceToy method only had to worry about toy cars and helicopters. As their line expanded, it needed to be updated for "jumping frogs" too. Adding each new toy to the single function would be difficult to maintain but the simple factory pattern came to the rescue. It allowed for the abstraction of the toy object creation out to other handling and other objects, breaking the functionality up in accordance with the Single Responsibility Principle.