What is the Abstract Factory design pattern?

The Abstract Factory pattern provides an interface for creating families of related or dependent objects without specifying their concrete classes. Think of it as a factory of factories. For example, a UI toolkit might have a GUIFactory interface with methods createButton() and createCheckbox(). Concrete implementations like WindowsFactory and MacFactory produce Windows-style or Mac-style widgets respectively. Client code only depends on the abstract interface, so you can switch the entire family of products by swapping the factory without touching any client code.