What's the proper way to share the interface?

Question

What if I have a project that relies on the abstraction(interface) but does not contain any implementation for this interface. Therefore I want to give that interface to someone who can implement it so I (or someone else who is going to use my software) will be able to use their implementation of my interface.

Thus, I have the following question. How can I, let's say, share that interface?

The idea which came to me is to make JAR which contains interface and give it to someone who is going to implement that interface in JAR. After it, the one who implemented the interface, creates his JAR and gives it to me. So I can use his JAR with the implementation of my interface. Is it a proper way to do so?

The purpose of it is to make modular architecture so that if I need a new game(according to the above example), I'll take a JAR with implemented interface and just plug it in my project.

You should have an entry point (maybe `GameEngine` constructor?) where the caller can give the `GameInterface` into — Lino, Apr 05 '19 at 09:51
"Proper way" is debatable, but what you're doing isn't unreasonable, assuming it works for you — MadProgrammer, Apr 05 '19 at 09:51

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 05 '19 at 09:53

Yes.

You should have a shared build artifact (JAR file) that contains only the interfaces, which your project and the implementing project can both depend on.

You may want to look into tools like Maven or Gradle for helping orchestrate your build process with dependencies like this. For example, you may want to publish your API JAR to a shared package repository that both developers can work with.

You may also want to look into java.util.ServiceLoader and the Service Locator pattern, for discovering which specific implementation(s) you have available.

What's the proper way to share the interface?

1 Answers1