The Prototype pattern comes under the creational design pattern family of GOF patterns in software development. This pattern is used to create the objects by using a clone method of objects. It is determined by a prototypical instance. In the enterprise application, object creation is costly in terms of creating and initializing the initial properties of objects. If such a type of object is already in your hand, then you go for the prototype pattern; you just copy an existing similar object instead of creating it, which is time-consuming.

This pattern involves implementing a prototype interface, it creates a clone of the current object. This pattern is used when the direct creation of the object is costly. For example, say that an object is to be created after a costly database operation. We can cache the object, returns its clone on the next request, and update the database as and when it is needed, thus reducing database calls.