Pythonic Interface definitions
interface
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interface
provides facilities for declaring interfaces and for statically
asserting that classes implement those interfaces. It supports Python 2.7 and
Python 3.4+.
interface
improves on Python's abc
module in two ways:
Interface requirements are checked at class creation time, rather than at
instance creation time. This means that interface
can tell you if a
class fails to meet the requirements of an interface even if you never
create any instances of that class.
interface
requires that method signatures of interface implementations
are compatible with the signatures declared in the interface. For example,
the following code using abc
does not produce an error:
.. code-block:: python
from abc import ABCMeta, abstractmethod class Base(metaclass=ABCMeta): ... @abstractmethod ... def method(self, a, b): ... pass ... class Implementation(MyABC): ... def method(self): ... return "This shouldn't work." ... impl = Implementation()
The equivalent code using interface
produces an error indicating that
the signature of our implementation method is incompatible with the
signature of our interface declaration:
.. code-block:: python
from interface import implements, Interface class I(Interface): ... def method(self, a, b): ... pass ... class C(implements(I)): ... def method(self): ... return "This shouldn't work" ... TypeError: class C failed to implement interface I:
The following methods were implemented but had invalid signatures: - method(self) != method(self, a, b)
Defining an Interface ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To define an interface, simply subclass from interface.Interface
and define
method stubs in your class body.
.. code-block:: python
from interface import Interface
class MyInterface(Interface):
def method1(self):
pass
def method2(self, arg1, arg2):
pass
Implementing an Interface ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To declare that a particular class implements an interface I
, pass
implements(I)
as a base class for your class.
.. code-block:: python
from interface import implements
class MyClass(implements(MyInterface)):
def method1(self):
return "method1"
def method2(self, arg1, arg2):
return "method2"
Installation ~~~~~~~~~~~~
.. code-block:: shell
$ pip install python-interface
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