Summary

=======

Define an interface which declares static methods.

The essence of what I mean by this is: define a number of classes which contain common static methods.

Details

=======

What we are trying to achieve here is effectively an interface which garuantees us that the classes of a particular type (with a common parent class/interface) will all contain a specific method to which we have static access.

Simple example

==============

Here we have two classes that implement the Animal interface ( Dog and Cat ). Each class supplies a static method getType() which returns some non-instance-specific information (this method is static because the type is the same for all instances of the given class. E.g. ALL Dogs are of type 'Doggy').

			

			interface Animal
			

			{
			

			...
			

			}
			

			

			class Dog implements Animal
			

			{
			

			public static String
			getType
			()
			

			{
			

			return "Doggy";
			

			}
			

			...
			

			}
			

			

			class Cat implements Animal
			

			{
			

			public static String
			getType
			()
			

			{
			

			return "Kitty";
			

			}
			

			...
			

			}
			

		

The problem is: How can we garuantee a client application that all Animals will supply (in some way) this static method.

[In this particular example the methods differ only in the information they return, but the solution should allow the implementation of these methods to differ too].

Thanks for your thoughts.

JohnSenford
[@hotmail.com]