Question

In my cache class, I’m going to have a function which writes the serialized version of an object (undecided type) to a file, something like this (generic function):

public <O> void write(O object) {

   // ...
   serialize(file, object);
   // ...

}

Which works great, however, I’m unable to find a way to create a method which can return any object, like the write() method can take any object. Looking for something like this:

public <O> read() {

   // ...
   O object = unserialize(file);
   // ...

   return object;

}

Any suggestions on how to accomplish this is highly appreciated!

Answer 1

You specify the return type of type Object:

public Object function(...)

That way the return type will always be of type Object (since all objects are descendants of Object), so they will be accepted.