Last Updated 40 Weeks Ago

[transcendant]

So...yeah, I guess I suck at updating. But whatever.

Random coding gripe of the day. What's the point of creating an interface class if you're going to leave it completely empty; it isn't usable as a real base type that way, now is it?

Comments

[crescentdude]

It's a "marker interface". It has a variety of uses. Serializable and Remote are marker interfaces. It can be used as a security measure where you have an action that can be performed on any object, but that you want to only perform on objects specifically tagged with that marker.

I'm pretty sure, though, that annotations in Java 5 and beyond have eliminated the need for marker interfaces.