101 Q, verification on simple issue: objects in package

[Edmund Castermund]

This is one of the super basic newb q's I shouldn't need to ask, but..
Just need to verify two things:

1) there's no way to create a method that will return any object from a package, as in:

public com.somepackage.Object getAnyObjectThatBelongsToPackage();

and 2) it's bad design to create an abstract superclass with no methods or properties so that you can do the above?

I'm just not crazy about

 public Object returnObjectThatCouldBeAnythingUnderTheSun();

what are the best ways to deal with that issue?
thanks!
ec

[Rob Spoor]

Why would you want to do something like this? You get just any object, but you can't do anything with it. The least you should do is use a common interface. You can then perhaps use the ServiceLoader mechanism to return a number of implementations.

[Edmund Castermund]

the immediate task is to read an xml file and create objects...I suppose I can create an arraylist of the top level objects and test each interface, as you say.