I am looking at nServiceBus and came over this interface
namespace NServiceBus
{
public interface IMessage
{
}
}
What is the use of an empty interface?
Usually it's to signal usage of a class. You can implement IMessage to signal that your class is a message. Other code can then use reflection to see if your objects are meant to be used as messages and act accordingly.
This is something that was used in Java a lot before they had annotations. In .Net it's cleaner to use attributes for this.
#Stimpy77 Thanks! I hadn't thought of it that way.
I hope you'll allow me to rephrase your comment in a more general way.
Annotations and attributes have to be checked at runtime using reflection. Empty interfaces can be checked at compile-time using the type-system in the compiler. This brings no overhead at runtime at all so it is faster.
Also known as a Marker Interface:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marker_interface_pattern
In java Serializable is the perfect example for this. It defines no methods but every class that "implements" it has to make sure, that it is really serializable and holds no reference to things that cannot be serialized, like database connections, open files etc.
In Java, empty interfaces were usually used for "tagging" classes - these days annotations would normally be used.
It's just a way of adding a bit of metadata to a class saying, "This class is suitable for <this> kind of use" even when no common members will be involved.
Normally it's similar to attributes. Using attributes is a preferred to empty interfaces (at least as much as FxCop is aware). However .NET itself uses some of these interfaces like IRequiresSessionState and IReadOnlySessionState. I think there is performance loss in metadata lookup when you use attributes that made them use interfaces instead.
An empty interface acts simply as a placeholder for a data type no better specified in its interface behaviour.
In Java, the mechanism of the interface extension represents a good example of use. For example, let's say that we've the following
interface one {}
interface two {}
interface three extends one, two {}
Interface three will inherit the behaviour of 'one' and 'two', and so
class four implements three { ... }
has to specify the two methods, being of type 'three'.
As you can see, from the above example, empty interface can be seen also as a point of multiple inheritance (not allowed in Java).
Hoping this helps to clarify with a further viewpoint.
They're called "Mark Interfaces" and are meant to signal instances of the marked classes.
For example... in C++ is a common practice to mark as "ICollectible" objects so they can be stored in generic non typed collections.
So like someone over says, they're to signal some object supported behavior, like ability to be collected, serialized, etc.
Been working with NServiceBus for the past year. While I wouldn't speak for Udi Dahan my understanding is that this interface is indeed used as a marker primarily.
Though I'd suggest you ask the man himself if he'd had thoughts of leaving this for future extension. My bet is no, as the mantra seems to be to keep messages very simple or at least practically platform agnostic.
Others answer well on the more general reasons for empty interfaces.
I'd say its used for "future" reference or if you want to share some objects, meaning you could have 10 classes each implementing this interface.
And have them sent to a function for work on them, but if the interface is empty, I'd say its just "pre"-work.
Empty interfaces are used to document that the classes that implement a given interface have a certain behaviour
For example in java the Cloneable interface in Java is an empty interface. When a class implements the Cloneable interface you know that you can call run the clone() on it.
Empty interfaces are used to mark the class, at run time type check can be performed using the interfaces.
For example
An application of marker interfaces from the Java programming language is the Serializable interface. A class implements this interface to indicate that its non-transient data members can be written to an ObjectOutputStream. The ObjectOutputStream private method writeObject() contains a series of instanceof tests to determine writeability, one of which looks for the Serializable interface. If any of these tests fails, the method throws a NotSerializableException.
An empty interface can be used to classify classes under a specific purpose. (Marker Interface)
Example : Database Entities
public interface IEntity {
}
public class Question implements IEntity {
// Implementation Goes Here
}
public class Answer implements IEntity {
// Implementation Goes Here
}
For Instance, If you will be using Generic Repository(ex. IEntityRepository), using generic constraints, you can prevent the classes that do not implement the IEntity interface from being sent by the developers.
Related
I writing a small Snake game in Lazarus, and Lazarus complains when I write
type
ISegment = interface(IRenderable, IMover)
end;
When I'm trying to achieve is to make ISegment a combined interface, but it doesn't seem to work. Does Lazarus not support multiple interface inheritance?
There is no multiple inheritance supported in the language. A class cannot be derived from multiple base classes. An interface cannot be derived from multiple base interfaces.
What you can do however, is have a class that implements multiple interfaces. Like this:
type
TMyClass = class(TInterfacedObject, IFoo, IBar)
....
end;
It does, you just need a better reading skill to understand this (look at the syntax diagram, in the heritage part). class type identifier is not stated as optional, but implemented interface does. It's roughly read as:
"A class may extend a base class and implements as many interfaces as possible. When an interface is about to be implemented, the base class must also be specified. The other way around does not apply, you can perfectly have a class extends a base class without specifying any interface"
The answer is no, Pascal is not supposed to support multiple inheritance so I don't see why it should do a different thing for interfaces then
As explained in previous answer, you still can implement several interfaces in a class
We cannot create an instance of an interface.
But why does Arrays.asList(Object[] a) in the Java API, return a List (List being an interface)?
Thank you!
It creates an instance of a class which implements the interface.
You don't know what that class is; it could even use a different class every other Tuesday (it doesn't).
You just use the class through the interface.
Java and OOO programming in general lets you define how an object should be used (that´s the interface of the object) so only the library implementor needs to worry about the gory details of how things actually work. That´s why it is good practice to never return a class itself but just an interface, in addition to better maintanibility it will also let you use mocks or stubs objects when coding tests for your applications.
Java in particular let´s you create an interface implementation on fly. i.e you can do something like
return new List() {
boolean add() {...}
void addAll {...}
...
}
This is of course an overkill for complex interfaces like List but actually very handy for smaller interfaces.
I would like to pass an interface to a method signature which takes Object as its parameter, so I wonder about this question
public Stream GetViewStream(string viewName, object model, ControllerContext context)
instead of object I shall like to pass an interface Imodel, without modifying the signature. Is there a base class for interfaces?
Also in the new mvc2 is there a way to avoid controllercontext altogether?
I'd only answer the first question - Why there's no common base interface for all interfaces ?
First of all, there's no common pre-defined base interface for all interfaces, unlike the System.Object case. Explaining this can get very interesting.
Let us assume, you could have a common interface for all interfaces in the system. That means, all interfaces will need to force their implementations to provide implementation-details for that common base interface. In general, interface are used to give specific special behaviors to their concrete implementation classes. Obviously you only want to define an interface when you only know what to do and don't know HOW to do that. So, if you let there be a common base interface for all interface and force the implementations to expect them to provide details of how to do it - why would you want to do it ? What common task each class should do that varies from one another ?
Lets look at the other side of the coin, why we have System.object as base class of any .Net type - It is simple it gives you some methods that have COMMON implementation for any .Net type and for those methods that it might vary from type-to-type they have made it virtual ex: .ToString()
There's possibly no assumption of any
system-wide interface method which is
virtual/abstract to all its
implementations.
One common practice of using Interface is say, defining a particular behavior to any type. Like I'd have an interface IFlyable which will give Fly() to all types that implement IFlyable. This way I can play with any Flyable object regardless of its inheritance hierarchy coming into picture. I can write a method like this..
public void FlyTheObject(IFlyable flyingObject)
{
flyginObject.Fly();
}
It does not demand anything from the object but the implementation of the Fly() method.
EDIT
Additionally, All interfaces will resolve to Object because interfaces cannot be instantiated. The object is always of a concrete class that can be instantiated. This class may or may not implement your interface but as we know, any .Net type is ultimately based to System.Object, so you will be able to take the instance into an object type regardless of the fact if it implements a particular interface or not.
No, there is no base class for interfaces. Nor there is base interface for interfaces.
As for your second question (and partly first one) - what are actually you trying to do?
There is no base class for interfaces, but you can pass any interface variable e.g:
private IEnumerable<int> myInterfaceVariable = new List<int>();
to your method because by definition anything that is stored in that variable must be an instance of a class that inherits from the interface - therefore it must be an object.
The following compiles fine:
public class InterfaceAsObject
{
private IEnumerable<int> myInterfaceVariable = new List<int>();
private void CallDoSomething()
{
DoSomething(myInterfaceVariable);
}
private void DoSomething(object input)
{
}
}
Re 1, there is no base interface, but if I understand you correctly, you can achieve what I think you want by just passing your object that implements IModel via the model parameter and cast (and check!) the parameter to IModel. I use 'as' and check for null.
If you don't need total flexibility, a better way of doing this is to define the interface that the model parameter must support. If the specific objects support derived interfaces (e.g. IDerivedModel : IModel) this will work too.
Look up a text-book on polymorphism.
Whenever I create an abstract class I tend to create an interface to go along with it and have other code refer to the interface and not the abstract class. Usually when I don't create an interface to start with I regret it (such as having to override all implimented methods to stub the class for unit testing or later down the line new classes don't need any of the implimentation and override everything also finding themselves unable to extend any other class).
At first I tried to distinguish when to use an interface and when to use an abstract class by considering is-a vs able-to but I still would end up suffering later down the line for not making an interface to start with.
So the question is when is it a good idea to only have an abstract class and no interface at all?
When you wish to "give" some base class functionality to derived classes but when this functionality is not sufficient to instantiate a usable class, then go for abstract classes.
When you wish that some classes completely implement a set of methods (a public contract), then it is a convenient to define such contract with interfaces and enforce them onto classes by making them inherit this interface.
In short:
With abstract classes you give some common base functionality to derived classes. No further actions are necessary unless abstract class has some stubs (which have to be implemented down there).
With interfaces you require derived classes to implement a set of functions and you do not pass along any implementation.
So the question is when is it a good idea to only have an abstract class and no interface at all?
When you do not wish to enforce any public contract (a set of methods/properties defined by an interface).
Also when you do not plan to use certain coding techniques like casting object to an interface type (run-time polymorphism) or limit allowed input (some method argument will only accept object of types which implement certain interfaces).
Well, the main case it is useful to have only an abstract class without any interface is to mark a certain type. It is useful to be able to check if an object "is-a" something. These interface "mark" an objet to be of a certain type. Depending on the language you use, different design patterns apply ...
These sort of abstract classes exist in java. You can also use them in C++ with RTTI.
my2c
Similar question but not quite the same thing
I was thinking that with extension methods in the same namespace as the interface you could get a similar effect to multiple inheritance in that you don't need to have duplicate code implementing the same interface the same way in 10 different classes.
What are some of the downsides of doing this? I think the pros are pretty obvious, it's the cons that usually come back to bite you later on.
One of the cons I see is that the extension methods can't be virtual, so you need to be sure that you actually do want them implemented the same way for every instance.
The problem that I see with building interface capability via extension methods is that you are no longer actually implementing the interface and so can't use the object as the interface type.
Say I have a method that takes an object of type IBar. If I implement the IBar interface on class Foo via extension methods, then Foo doesn't derive from IBar and can't be used interchangeably with it (Liskov Substitution principle). Sure, I get the behavior that I want added to Foo, but I lose the most important aspect of creating interfaces in the first place -- being able to define an abstract contract that can be implemented in a variety of ways by various classes so that dependent classes need not know about concrete implementations.
If I needed multiple inheritance (and so far I've lived without it) badly enough, I think I'd use composition instead to minimize the amount of code duplication.
A decent way to think about this is that instance methods are something done by the object, while extension methods are something done to the object. I am fairly certain the Framework Design Guidelines say you should implement an instance method whenever possible.
An interface declares "I care about using this functionality, but not how it is accomplished." That leaves implementers the freedom to choose the how. It decouples the intent, a public API, from the mechanism, a class with concrete code.
As this is the main benefit of interfaces, implementing them entirely as extension methods seems to defeat their purpose. Even IEnumerable<T> has an instance method.
Edit: Also, objects are meant to act on the data they contain. Extension methods can only see an object's public API (as they are just static methods); you would have to expose all of an object's state to make it work (an OO no-no).