Façade

fa-cade [fuh-sahd, fa-]
–noun

2 : An artificial or deceptive front

- The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

The façade pattern is an object-oriented design pattern. A façade is an object that provides a simplified interface to a larger body of code, such as a class library. A façade can:

• make a software library easier to use and understand, since the façade has convenient methods for common tasks;
• make code that uses the library more readable, for the same reason;
• reduce dependencies of outside code on the inner workings of a library, since most code uses the façade, thus allowing more flexibility in developing the system;
• wrap a poorly designed collection of APIs with a single well-designed API.

- From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia