Well, again I would call the Factory not a class but a package with a "static" method: Bod::Social::Factory::new_for(network => 'Twitter') (borrowing from Fletch's comment above). Perl makes that distinction possible whereas I guess in Java it would technically be a class. OTOH, why not if it suits you?

That said, and purisms aside, I would expect the constructor of a class to return ... erm ... an object of that same class. In Java, I hope I guess correctly, it is impossible for a constructor to return anything other than the object of that class (there is no return statement as such). So, Bod::Social::Factory->new(network => 'Twitter') returning TwitterClass or XYZClass or ... depending on input params strikes me as a bit weird, or unexpected. Where Bod::Social::Factory::new_for(network => 'Twitter'); (notice the difference in ::new_for) is more intuitive for me. But even TIMTOWTDI is spelled in many ways hehe!

Now, what would be inside new()/new_for()? I would put in there this:

use Bod::Social::Twitter;
sub new_for {
  my ($network, $params) = @_;
  if( $network eq 'Twitter' ){ return Bod::Social::Twitter->new($param
+s) }
  elsif( ... ){ ... }
  die "don't know network $network"
}
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Which also implies a class Bod::Social::Twitter, which can be a subclass of Bod::Social (option (2)) or be completely independent, if you did not find enough common ground to create a social API in Bod::Social

That was helpful to me: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/design_pattern/factory_pattern.htm, but thankfully Perl is way less restrictive than Java.

bw, bliako

I would expect the constructor of a class to return ... erm ... an object of that same class

Yes...that's kind of obvious but until you mentioned it wasn't front of mind.

Having the constructor return the same class or a subclass of it has been added to my mental list of things to make sure of when creating a new module.