when to use interface

[ahamed irshad]

hi to all,

i know the concept of interface.but i have no clear cut idea about when should i use interface.thanks in advance

[Jesper de Jong]

There are many reasons why you might want to use an interface.

One example is to decouple "how a service looks" from the actual implementation, which allows you to have different implementations (that all "look the same" from the outside). A client program (that uses the service) is programmed against just the interface, so that different implementations can be plugged in at runtime. An example of this are JDBC drivers. In your program that uses JDBC, you just use the interfaces (for example Connection, Statement, and ResultSet). The JDBC driver implements those interfaces with classes that are for a specific database (for example Oracle or MySQL), but the client program doesn't need to know the actual implementation classes.