Interface naming in Java [closed]

Solution 1:

I prefer not to use a prefix on interfaces:

• The prefix hurts readability.

• Using interfaces in clients is the standard best way to program, so interfaces names should be as short and pleasant as possible. Implementing classes should be uglier to discourage their use.

• When changing from an abstract class to an interface a coding convention with prefix I implies renaming all the occurrences of the class --- not good!

Solution 2:

Is there really a difference between:

class User implements IUser

and

class UserImpl implements User

if all we're talking about is naming conventions?

Personally I prefer NOT preceding the interface with I as I want to be coding to the interface and I consider that to be more important in terms of the naming convention. If you call the interface IUser then every consumer of that class needs to know its an IUser. If you call the class UserImpl then only the class and your DI container know about the Impl part and the consumers just know they're working with a User.

Then again, the times I've been forced to use Impl because a better name doesn't present itself have been few and far between because the implementation gets named according to the implementation because that's where it's important, e.g.

class DbBasedAccountDAO implements AccountDAO
class InMemoryAccountDAO implements AccountDAO

Solution 3:

There may be several reasons Java does not generally use the IUser convention.

1. Part of the Object-Oriented approach is that you should not have to know whether the client is using an interface or an implementation class. So, even List is an interface and String is an actual class, a method might be passed both of them - it doesn't make sense to visually distinguish the interfaces.

2. In general, we will actually prefer the use of interfaces in client code (prefer List to ArrayList, for instance). So it doesn't make sense to make the interfaces stand out as exceptions.

3. The Java naming convention prefers longer names with actual meanings to Hungarian-style prefixes. So that code will be as readable as possible: a List represents a list, and a User represents a user - not an IUser.