A question about Best Practices

Question

Im currently working on a project and have run into a bit of structure debate.
Our project works with a retional database.
Hence we have classes that model certain sections of the db.
We wish to create a Data Access Object to interface the model classe to the db. To enforce consitency in programming we were thinking of using an DAOInterface object that would define all methods ( ie load() , save() ect... )
This leads to one issue... because each model is different our interface would need to declare arguments and returns ast Object.
Which means a lot of casting .... ugh.. ugly.
however the solution to this problem is to create an interface for each DAOObject however this defeats the purpose... cause now any developer onthe team and sneak a method in without being standard across the board...
I was hoping my fellow developers may be able to share their experiences with this problem and provide recomendations.
thanks
J.

Answer 1

You can declare "marker" interfaces for your DO Classes to be included in the interface for the DAO Class.
public interface DAOInterface {
    DOInterface create(DOPrimaryKeyInterface key) throws DAOException;
public interface DOInterface {
public interface DOPrimaryKeyInterface {
}It still involves casting, but at least not from Object - and it does enforce the "contract."
As to keeping other developers from screwing it up, that's called Team Management and is out of the purview of this forum. ;D