Question

I’ve worked/seen a few spring-hibernate web application projects having as many interfaces as there are actual service and dao classes.

I always thought that these two as the main reasons for having these single implementation interfaces:

1. Spring can wire actual implementation as dependencies in a given class (loose coupling)

   public class Person { 
       @Autowired 
       private Address address;
   
       @Autowired 
       private AccountDetail accountDetail;
   
       public Person(Address address, AccountDetail accountDetail) 
       { // constructor
   

2. While unit testing, I can create mock classes and test a class in isolation.

   Address mockedAddress = mock(Address);
   AccountDetail mockedAccountDetail = mock(AccountDetail);
   Person underTestPerson = new Person(mockedAddress, mockedAccountDetail); 
   // unit test follows
   

But, of late, I realized that:

Spring can wire concrete implementation classes as dependencies:

public class Person { 

@Autowired 
private AddressImpl address;

@Autowired 
private AccountDetailImpl accountDetail;

public Person(AddressImpl address, AccountDetailImpl accountDetail) { 
// constructor

Mock frameworks like EasyMock can mock concrete classes as well

AddressImpl mockedAddress = mock(AddressImpl);
AccountDetailImpl mockedAccountDetail = mock(AccountDetailImpl);
Person underTestPerson = new Person(mockedAddress, mockedAccountDetail); 
// unit test follows

Also, as per this discussion, I think the summary is that within a single app, interfaces are mostly overused probably out of convention or habit. They generally make best sense in cases where we are interfacing with another application for example slf4j used by many apps around the world. Within a single app, a class is almost as much an abstraction as an interface is.

So, my question is why do we still need Interfaces and then have single implementations like *ServiceImpl and *DaoImpl classes and unnecessarily increase our code base size. Is there some issue in mocking concrete classes that I’m not aware of.

Whenever I’ve discussed this with my team-mates, only answer I get is that implementing service and dao classes based on interfaces is THE DESIGN everybody follows – they mention about spring best practices, OOP, DDD etc. But I still don’t get a pragmatic reason behind having so many interfaces within an isolated application.

Answer 1

There are more advantages to interfaces – As in proxying . If your class implements an interface , JDK dynamic proxies will be used by default for AOP . If you use the implementations directly, you’ll be forced to use CGLIB proxies by making proxy-target-class=true . These require byte code manipulation unlike JDK proxies .

read here for more on this .

Read another discussion at what reasons are there to use interfaces (Java EE or Spring and JPA) for more info .