Java abstract static Workaround

Question

I understand that neither a abstract class nor an interface can contain a method that is both abstract and static because of ambiguity problems, but is there a workaround?

I want to have either an abstract class or an interface that mandates the inclusion of a static method in all of the classes that extend/implement this class/interface. Is there a way to do this in Java? If not, this may be my final straw with Java...

EDIT 1: The context of this problem is that I have a bunch of classes, call them Stick, Ball, and Toy for now, that have a bunch of entries in a database. I want to create a superclass/interface called Fetchable that requires a static method getFetchables() in each of the classes below it. The reason the methods in Stick, Ball, and Toy have to be static is because they will be talking to a database to retrieve all of the entries in the database for each class.

EDIT 2: To those who say you cannot do this in any language, that is not true. You can certainly do this in Ruby where class methods are inherited. This is not a case of someone not getting OO, this is a case of missing functionality in the Java language. You can try to argue that you should never need to inherit static (class) methods, but that is utterly wrong and I will ignore any answers that make such points.

Answer 1

You have a couple of options:

1. Use reflection to see if the method exists and then call it.

2. Create an annotation for the static method named something like @GetAllWidgetsMethod.

3. As others have said, try to not use a static method.

Answer 2

There are lots of answers about 'this does'nt make sense..' but indeed I met a similar problem just yesterday.

I wanted to use inheritance with my unit tests. I have an API and several its implementations. So I need only 1 set of unit tests for all implementations but with different setUp methods which are static.

Workaround: all tests are abstract classes, with some static fields with protected access modifier. In all implementations I added static methods which set these static fields. It works rather nice, and I avoided copy and paste.