Java interfaces are not in the IB syllabus, but if you want to call yourself a higher level computer scientist you should at least have some idea about them.
An interface is like a class but it doesn’t have code in its methods. What is the point of that? Well imagine that I am on your team of programmers and you want me to do some coding for you. By creating an interface, you can specify what methods my classes should have, without actually coding them. This means you can go ahead and write code that calls those methods before I have even written them, and therefore we can both be programming at the same time, taking advantage of concurrency.
Some well-known Java interfaces are Serializable, Iterable and Comparable. Here I define an interface called Flickable. In order for a class to be Flickable, it should have a flick() method:
public class FunctionalInterfaceDemo {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Switch s = new Switch();
s.flick();
Flickable f = new Flickable () {
public void flick() {
System.out.println("Anonymous inner flickable class flicked.");
}
};
f.flick();
}
}
class Switch implements Flickable {
// This class MUST implement a flick() method, otherwise
// the code will not compile.
public void flick() {
System.out.println("Switch flicked.");
}
}
interface Flickable {
// This states that if you want to call yourself flickable,
// you have to implement a flick() method.
void flick();
}
This is a powerful aid to object-oriented programming because you can anticipate the behaviour of classes that claim to implement an interface safe in the knowledge that if they don’t implement the interface the compiler will already have detected the problem.
But there is a different problem. Suppose now I make a change to my Flickable interface and add a line void unflick();
. I have now moved the goalposts and said that any class that claims to be flickable must implement not only a flick() method but an unflick() method. The upshot is that all code that implements the flickable interface is now broken and will no longer compile!
From Java 8 onwards, you can declare an interface to be a functional interface. The reason for this is well beyond the scope of this post, but has to do with Java’s push to incorporate more practices from a programming paradigm called functional programming. The good news is that with the @FunctionalInterface compile directive, we can tell the compiler that our interface cannot have more than one method. This substantially reduces the possibility of breaking code by making a change to an interface, because the compiler will prevent it.
interface Flickable {
// This states that if you want to call yourself flickable,
// you have to implement a flick() method.
void flick();
// If you uncomment the next line you will break
// break all classes that implement Flickable:
// void otherMethod();
}
@FunctionalInterface
interface Proddable {
void prod();
// If you uncomment the next line you will get a
// compile error. You can't have more than one method
// in a functional interface.
// void otherMethod();
}