I have taken a look at the article Industrial Strength Pluggable Factory found in C++ Report from 99, in the end the author describes how they made a templated version of the Maker class. Im having problems trying to implement this, the problem is with the static map containing references instances of each factory along with a name. I have tried a number of different ways in the static newObject method to access the static map and retrieve the reference to the named factory instance but with no luck. With this code I get a LNK2020 error: error LNK2020: unresolved token (0A000075) ?registry@?$Factory@VKaross@@@@2V?$map@V.....

class AudiTTFactory : public KarossFactory
{
private:
	static const AudiTTFactory registerThis;
	AudiTTFactory() : KarossFactory("AudiTT") {};
	Kaross* makeObject()const
	{
		return new AudiTT();
	}
};

class KarossFactory : public Factory<Kaross>
{
public:
	KarossFactory(const string &className) : Factory<Kaross>(className) {};
};

template 
<class Object> class Factory
{
public:
typedef Factory<Object>* FactoryPtr; 
typedef map<string, FactoryPtr> FactoryMap;	
static FactoryMap registry;

virtual ~Factory(){};

Factory(const string& className)
{
  registry->insert( std::make_pair(className, this) );  	   
};

static Object* newObject(const string& className)
{
Factory<Object> *maker = Factory<Object>::registry.find(className)->second;
return maker->makeObject();
};

virtual Object* makeObject() const=0;
};

PluggableFactory error LNK2020: unresolved token (0A000075) ?registry@?$Factory@VKaross@@@@2V?$map@V?$basic_string@DU?$char_traits@D@std@@V?$allocator@D@2@@std@@PAV?$Factory@VKaross@@@@U?$less@V?$basic_string@DU?$char_traits@D@std@@V?$allocator@D@2@@std@@@2@V?$allocator@U?$pair@$$CBV?$basic_string@DU?$char_traits@D@std@@V?$allocator@D@2@@std@@PAV?$Factory@VKaross@@@@@std@@@2@@std@@A

Looks like you need to add:
template < typename Object >
typename Factory< Object >::FactoryMap Factory< Object >::registry;
You've declared your registry object, but you haven't actually defined it.

Enigma

Thanks for the help
Your code to solve the linker error + a definition of one AudiTTFactory object was needed to get it running and to fill the registry with an instance of the factory.