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The essence of the Factory Pattern is to "Define an interface for creating an object, but let the subclasses decide which class to instantiate. The Factory method lets a class defer instantiation to subclasses." Like other creational patterns, it deals with the problem of creating objects (products) without specifying the exact class of object that will be created. The factory method design pattern handles this problem by defining a separate method for creating the objects, whose subclasses can then override to specify the derived type of product that will be created. More generally, the term factory method is often used to refer to any method whose main purpose is creation of objects. Factory methods are common in toolkits and frameworks where library code needs to create objects of types which may be subclassed by applications using the framework.