When are interfaces needed?

Question

(In the context of .NET for what its worth)

I tend to not use inheritance and rarely use interfaces. I came across someone who thinks interfaces are the best thing since spit. He uses them everywhere. I don't understand this and hence the questions that follow. I just want a check on my understanding of interfaces.

If you are using interfaces everywhere, I'm assuming you can predict the future, your app requirements are nailed down and nothing will ever change in your app. For me, during early development especially, interfaces become a drag. The app is very dynamic through its life. If you need to subtract or add members to the interface, lots of stuff will break. The guy above says he creates another interface to handle the new member(s). Nothing breaks.

Isn't that composition? Why not use composition without interfaces? More flexible.

How does he handle the case where a member must be subtracted from the interface? Basically he doesn't. Things just break and that is great because now you can see all of the affected areas and fix them. Instead of figuring out more elegantly where all of the related code paths are, we should just rip out parts of classes through brute force?

I think of a software application as a graph. A complete graph is the worst case, having n(n-1)/2. This means every class talks to every class. A confusing spider web. n-1 is the best, in which their is a strict hierarchy of communication. Adding another interface just to compensate for a new needed member adds a vertici to the graph, which means more edges and a stronger realization of the n(n-1)/2 equation. Composition without interfaces is more like mixins. Only select classes use particular methods. With an interface, all classes are forced to use members, even if they don't need them. The composition/mixin approach doesn't add new unneeded edges.

Answer 1

Interfaces don't force classes to use methods. They force implementing classes to implement all methods, but that's a different matter.

I like the way that interfaces separate out API from implementation. Admittedly this is also done with access modifiers, but interfaces make it clearer. More importantly, interfaces also make mocking easier - which means that you can unit test the classes which depend on the interface even before you've ever implemented it.

And yes, this means I often end up with an interface which only has a single production implementation. That isn't a problem in my view, because I've gained testability.

On the other hand, I don't write an interface for every class. I like to write interfaces where an object is essentially providing a service - authentication, data access etc. Plain data objects (even with significant behaviour) aren't as useful in terms of interfaces, IME.

Answer 2

According to wikipedia,

The primary usage of polymorphism in industry (object-oriented programming theory) is the ability of objects belonging to different types to respond to method, field, or property calls of the same name, each one according to an appropriate type-specific behavior. The programmer (and the program) does not have to know the exact type of the object in advance, and so the exact behavior is determined at run time (this is called late binding or dynamic binding).

That's what makes interfaces so useful.

"The guy above says he creates another interface to handle the new member(s). Nothing breaks."

I'm just guessing here, but it sounds like this guy comes from an old school COM background (I could be wrong, of course!). Makes me cringe to think of all of the code I've worked on where I've seen things like this:

• IWidgetManager
• IWidgetManager2
• IWidgetManager3

That's not a good way to work with interfaces. In my experience, I've seen both extremes: fear of changing interfaces to the point where new interfaces are created whenever new members are added, or not using interfaces at all and having a product that suffers from a high degree of coupling. You need to find a good balance. It isn't always the end of the world to change an interface.

What is the size of the project you're working on? It can be hard to see the benefit of interfaces if it is a relatively small size project. If, on the other hand, it's a project with several hundred thousand lines of code and is composed of many modules, the benefits become far more apparent.