I'm building a little lwjgl library.
I have a RenderController, containing all the render objects AND other objects which are Renderable - so I took an Interface, called Renderable - containing the methods render() and. beforeRenderUpdate(). The problem is: the user of the library shouldn't be allowed to call RenderObject#update, because I want the lib to manage the rendering alone. But I want the user let have instances of this classes, because they sometimes extend AbstractMovableObject, and the user has to move them or request a uniform update. So, the option to create an abstract class containing the render method isn't possible. The advantage of an interfacr would be, I had one list in RenderController, objects <Renderable>(x).render().
But I don't want to have this render method public. What can I do now? As I sad, an abstract class isn't possible because this classes are extending something else.
Unfortunately there is no way to have protected methods in an interface. All methods in an interface are implicitly public and abstract. Any attempt to deviate from that pattern will not compile.
The following three methods are implicitly identical despite their appearance.
public abstract void doSomething();
public void doSomething();
void doSomething();
If however, you declare anything that explicitly contradicts the above, it will not compile. For example;
protected abstract void doSomething(); // Does not compile
public final void doSomething(); // Does not compile
A simple solution might be to make an abstract class fit the bill somehow. You could try having AbstractMovableObject and your new AbstractRenderableObject class both extend a third class that had this protected update() method (eg AbstractUpdatableObject)? That way they would both BE-A AbstractUpdatableObject, but would otherwise have a very limited relationship (no more than they would if they implemented the same interface) and could even have different implementations of update();.
