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An interface in the Java programming language is an abstract type that is used to declare a behavior that classes must implement. They are similar to protocols.Interfaces are declared using the interface keyword, and may only contain method signature and constant declarations (variable declarations that are declared to be both static and final).
In object-oriented programming, an interface or protocol type [a] is a data type that acts as an abstraction of a class. It describes a set of method signatures , the implementations of which may be provided by multiple classes that are otherwise not necessarily related to each other. [ 1 ]
In .NET, they are called "custom attributes", in Java they are called "annotations". Despite the different name, they are conceptually the same thing. They can be defined on classes, member variables, methods, and method parameters and may be accessed using reflection. In Python, the term "marker interface" is common in Zope and Plone.
I find OOP technically unsound. It attempts to decompose the world in terms of interfaces that vary on a single type. To deal with the real problems you need multisorted algebras — families of interfaces that span multiple types. I find OOP philosophically unsound. It claims that everything is an object.
The use of interfaces to allow disparate teams to collaborate raises the question of how interface changes happen in interface-based programming. The problem is that if an interface is changed, e.g. by adding a new method, old code written to implement the interface will no longer compile – and in the case of dynamically loaded or linked plugins, will either fail to load or link, or crash at ...
In its most common form, an interface is a specification of a group of related methods without any associated implementation of the methods. A television set also has a myriad of attributes, such as size and whether it supports color, which together comprise its structure. A class represents the full description of a television, including its ...
An instance of the interface is syntactically no more useful than the interface name itself (since it has no methods). Unless a developer checks any implemented interfaces when adding a constant to a class, or does so but makes a typo in the name of the added constant, the value of a constant can be silently changed. Consider Example 2 below.
An implementation of composition over inheritance typically begins with the creation of various interfaces representing the behaviors that the system must exhibit. Interfaces can facilitate polymorphic behavior. Classes implementing the identified interfaces are built and added to business domain classes as needed.