Question

I agree, that programming against interfaces is a good practice. In most cases in Java ‘interface’ in this sense means the language construct interface, so that you write an interface and an implementation class and that you use the interface instead of the implementation class most of the time.

I wonder if this is a good practice for writing domain models as well. So, for example if you’ve got a domain class Customer and each customer may have a list of Orders, would you generally also write interfaces ICustomer and IOrder. And also would Customer have a list of IOrders instead of Orders? Or would you use interfaces in the domain model, only if it is really driven by the domain, e.g. you’ve got at least two different types of Orders? In other words, would you use interfaces because of only technical needs in the domain model, or only when it is really appropriate with respect to the actual domain?

Answer 1

Writing interfaces ‘just because’ strikes me as a waste of time and energy, not to mention a violation of the KISS-principle.

I write them when they are actually useful in representing common behavior of related classes, not just as a fancy header file.