Two of the hardest topics to make meaningful to students in APCS-A are inheritance and interfaces. It's not that they're super difficult topics but rather that they're not often needed, useful, or superior to not using them on beginner assignments. More often than not the motivation is a bit forced as are the assignments.

Inheritance is its own can of worms and to be honest, something I've not found to be all that useful or necessary. The class abstraction made sense to me for a number of projects but deep inheritance just hasn't come up much.

In any event, today I thought I'd talk about interfaces.

When Java was first built a decision was made not to allow multiple inheritance - the idea that a class can be derived from multiple parents. Multiple inheritance is powerful but it can also be complicated and confusing. By not including multiple inheritance Java ended up easier to work with than say C++ but there were times where you needed features that multiple inheritance provide. Specifically there are times when you need some functionality that operates across multiple unrelated classes. Without any other features, you'd have to start all of your classes from a single based class and include that functionality. Clearly not a good idea.

The first useful example is probably Comparable

At first blush it might not seem all that useful.

Let's suppose you are doing something like finding the first String (alphabetically) from an array:

That's easy enough but what if you had another class, Shape where you wanted to find the "smallest" based on area and a third class Person where you want to find the smallest by age? Without interfaces you would need three independent search routines or set up a crazy inheritance hierarchy where String, Person and Shape all come from the same parent. Instead, by having your two new classes implement the Comparable interface all three can use the same search:

This is not entirely true. The above solution will give you compiler warnings. You'll have to decide if it makes sense to jump through the hoops necessary to get rid of the warnings or if it's sufficient to do some vigorous had waving.

This is the benefit of interfaces. You can create functionality that works across classes. In addition to writing things like our findSmallest above, if our classes implement Comparable we can sort collections of our classes using the built in sort methods.

This is a benefit that our students can probably appreciate.

Anther place interfaces come up and make sense are with GUI programming. It's pretty easy to show the utility of using interfaces with the assorted listeners. That said, Java GUI programming is something of a bear so maybe that's not the way to go.

Where else can you explore interfaces in APCS-A? Any program where you have different entities that change in different ways over time. This might be a simulation where time passes via a control loop or maybe a game where time passes a turn at a time.

For example, you might have a simulation with various resources that implement an interface with an update routine:

Maybe a food resource updates by raising or lowering the amount of food it provides or perhaps an animal resource updates its location. You could have an array of objects that implement this interface and just call update on each one.

You could do the same with a game. Maybe the human player's update prompts for keyboard input while non player characters just calculate their next state.

Interfaces are not the easiest thing to teach. The mechanics are straightforward but the motivation is frequently forced for beginners. I was never 100% happy with how I did it and now that I'm in a C++ shop it doesn't come up but I hope this is helpful to some of you out there.