Java Programming/Interfaces

An interface is an abstraction of class with no implementation details. For example,  is a standard interface in Java. You cannot instantiate an interface. An interface is not a class but it is written the same way. The first difference is that you do not use the keyword but the  keyword to define it. Then, there are fields and methods you cannot define here: An interface represents a contract:
 * A field is always a constant: it is always public, static and final, even if you do not mention it.
 * A method must be public and abstract, but it is not required to write the and  keywords.
 * Constructors are forbidden.

You can see that the  method is abstract (unimplemented). To use an interface, you have to define a class that implements it, using the keyword:

A class can implement several interfaces, separated by a comma. Java interfaces behave much like the concept of the Objective-C protocol. It is recommended to name an interface, to mean the type of action this interface would enable on a class. However, it is not recommended to start the name of an interface by  as in C++. It is useless. Your IDE will help you instead.

Interest
If you have objects from different classes that do not have a common superclass, you can't call the same method in those classes, even if the two classes implement a method with the same signature.

The solution is to write an interface that defines the method that should be implemented in the two classes as the  in the Code listing 4.14 and then both classes can implement the interface as in the Code listing 4.15.

You can also implement this using a common super class but a class can only inherit from one super class whereas it can implement several interfaces.

Java does not support full orthogonal multiple inheritance (i.e. Java does not allow you to create a subclass from two classes). Multiple inheritance in C++ has complicated rules to disambiguate fields and methods inherited from multiple superclasses and types that are inherited multiple times. By separating interface from implementation, interfaces offer much of the benefit of multiple inheritance with less complexity and ambiguity. The price of no multiple inheritance is some code redundancy; since interfaces only define the signature of a class but cannot contain any implementation, every class inheriting an interface must provide the implementation of the defined methods, unlike in pure multiple inheritance, where the implementation is also inherited. The major benefit of that is that all Java objects can have a common ancestor (a class called ).

When overriding methods defined in interfaces there are several rules to be followed:
 * Checked exceptions should not be declared on implementation methods other than the ones declared by the interface method or subclasses of those declared by the interface method.
 * The signature of the interface method and the same return type or subtype should be maintained when implementing the methods.
 * All the methods of the interface need to be defined in the class, unless the class that implements the interface is abstract.

Extending interfaces
An interface can extend several interfaces, similar to the way that a class can extend another class, using the keyword:

This way, a class implementing the  interface has to implement the , the   and the   methods:

Doing so, a  object can be casted into ,   and.

Question 4.2: Consider the following interfaces.

List all the methods that an implementing class of  should implement.



Question 4.3: Consider the following classes and the following code.

Change the implementation of the code in order to be able to uncomment the commented line without compile error.

You have to create an interface that defines the method  and makes   and   implement it:

Now your code has to cast the objects to the  type and then you can uncomment the code.

Programmation Java/Interfaces