Intent: Provide a mechanism to temporarily make some aspect of an object unmodifiable or to suppress unneeded update notifications.
http://www.castle-cadenza.demon.co.uk/lock.htm
Related Patterns: ReadWriteLock, ObserverPattern, SchedulerPattern
See also: LockAdapter
What about when I need to deny readers read-access to an object while it is in an inconsistent state ( a writer is in the middle of making modifications) ? Should LockPattern be extended to cover that as well, or is there a different pattern name I should use for that ? -- DavidCary