Sunday, April 30, 2006

To interface or not to interface

I've posted some comments on Troy Brumley's blog here . He liked the metaphor interface is a "firewall": we use it in order to isolate "changes": I don't want to be affected by your changes, and you don't want to be affected by my changes.


Actually an interface is a "wall", a very thin layer, which hides implementation details. And we should use is at framework, package and object level. In practice it doesn't happen: we "trust" our object within an package, or within a framework.


An interface defines a "contract": somebody understands this set of messages. Why don't we have interfaces in dynamic languages? Because we don't need this wall, we are always talking to a duck.The implementation is always hidden.The contract  resides in the UnitTests.



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