As most of you are probably aware ‘default interface methods’ was one of the new features introduced in Java 8. The stated purpose of such a feature seems to be to allow extending existing interfaces without breaking backward compatibility.
However since its now part of the core language I’ve been thinking that such a feature could potentially be pretty useful for other use cases such as implementing a clean and lightweight entity component systems (such as those described by Adam Martin).
You could for example have code like the following:
public class Ship implements Logic, Render, Collision {
...
}
You would just implement the interfaces/components each class/entity would need. You then only need to override a few default methods as needed and the bulk of code can be contained in the interfaces/components. Using Java’s ‘instanceof’ you can easily tell which class implements which types of interfaces/components.
As far as I can tell, this type of usage would potentially allows faster, smaller, cleaner and more flexible code for these types of use cases. However many articles recommend against such usage and consider it an abuse of the feature.
Not really found any detailed discussion on the topic, so wanted to get some opinions on such usage or if others have been using default methods in a similar way?