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Smarter Java development

Use interfaces to effectively enforce development contracts while maintaining loose coupling of code

By Michael Cymerman, JavaWorld.com, 08/01/99

Page 3 of 4

Final thoughts on interfaces

This article has demonstrated some of the benefits of coding to interfaces. This technique enables greater efficiency throughout each phase of the development lifecycle.

During the design phases of the project, interfaces allow the quick establishment of the desired interactions among objects. The implementation objects associated with a given interface can be defined after the methods and requirements for that interface are specified. The more quickly the interaction is established, the more quickly the design phase can progress into development.

Interfaces give developers the ability to expose and limit certain methods and information to the users of their objects without changing the permissions and internal structure of the object itself. The use of interfaces can help eliminate the pesky bugs that appear when code developed by multiple development teams is integrated.

Contract enforcement is provided by the interface. Because the interface is generally agreed upon during the design phase of the project, the developers have the ability to concentrate on their individual modules without having to worry about the modules of their colleagues. Integrating these subsystems is made more efficient by the fact that the contracts have already been enforced throughout the development phase.

For testing purposes, a simple driver object can be created to implement the agreed-upon interfaces. Using this object, developers can continue their work with the knowledge that they are using the proper methods to access the object. When the objects are deployed in a test environment, the driver classes are replaced by the true classes, allowing the object to be tested without code or property changes.

This scheme provides the capability for easy expansion of this system; in our example, we could expand the code to include more forms of resources, such as meeting rooms and audio/video equipment. Any additional implementation of the Resource interface will fit into the established mechanism without modifying the existing code. Large-scale projects using this scheme could be designed and implemented in such a way that additional functionality can be added without major modification to the infrastructure. As an example, the ConferenceRoom object was created. This object implements the Resource interface and can interact with the Schedule and Occurrence implementers without changing the infrastructure.

Another benefit is the centralized location of the code. If new methods are to be added to the Resource interface, all implementations of this interface will be identified as requiring change. This will reduce the investigation required to determine the possible impact of changes to the interface.

In addition to the development benefits, the technique presented in this article provides project management with the assurance that interobject or intersystem communication patterns have been established and enforced throughout the development cycle. This reduces the risk of failures during the integration and testing phases of the project.

 

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