Question

For example a real estate builder is constructing an apartment with many flats. All the rooms in the flats have the same design, except the bedroom. The bedroom design is left for the people who would own the flats i.e; the bed Rooms can be of different designs for different flats.

I can achieve this through an abstract class like below:

public abstract class Flat
{
    //some properties

    public void livingRoom(){
       //some code
    }

    public void kitchen(){
       //some code
    }

    public abstract void bedRoom();

    }
}

An implementation class would be as follows:

public class Flat101 extends Flat
{
    public void bedRoom() {
        System.out.println("This flat has a customized bedroom");
   }        

}

Alternatively I can use an interface instead of an abstract class to achieve the same purpose like follows:

class Flat
{
  public void livingRoom(){ 
       System.out.println("This flat has a living room");
  }

  public void kitchen(){
     System.out.println("This flat has a kitchen");
  } 
}

interface BedRoomInterface
{
  public abstract void bedRoom();
}

public class Flat101 extends Flat implements BedRoomInterface
{
   public void bedRoom() {
    System.out.println("This flat has a customized bedroom");
   }
}

Now the question is : For this why should choose to use an interface (or) why should I choose to use an abstract class?

Answer 1

It depends on your intention or use case. But in general, you should prefer interface over abstract classes (Item 18 in Bloch’s Effective Java). Abstract classes are more fragile, because someone may modify the abstract class changing the behavior of other classes extending from it (this is a general statement).

It’s more flexible to work with interfaces, because if you have BedroomInterface and LivingRoomInterface, then you can have FlatInterface implementing both interfaces, then Flat101 implementation class implements FlatInterface (instead of extending from Flat then implementing an interface). This seems clearer, and later on you can have ExecutiveFlatInterface which not only have bedroom and living room but also guess room, then Flat102 can implement from it.

Option 2 is to have Flat101 extend from Flat, then Flat implements BedroomInterface and LivingRoomInterface. This really depends on what you want to do and what methods are likely needed.