java - Abstract Class:-Real Time Example

Question

Recently in a interview I was asked a very general question "what is abstract in java".I gave the definition and it was followed with some other question on abstract as what is abstract method and difference between abstract method and concrete method and etc. Then at last interviewer asked to give a real time example when I should use or define a class as abstract.I got confused.I gave some example but he was not convinced.

I googled it but found no real solution.

So can someone give me real time example i.e. when he defined a class as abstract in his/her project and why?

Thanks.

Answer 1

A good example of real time found from here:-

A concrete example of an abstract class would be a class called Animal. You see many animals in real life, but there are only kinds of animals. That is, you never look at something purple and furry and say "that is an animal and there is no more specific way of defining it". Instead, you see a dog or a cat or a pig... all animals. The point is, that you can never see an animal walking around that isn't more specifically something else (duck, pig, etc.). The Animal is the abstract class and Duck/Pig/Cat are all classes that derive from that base class. Animals might provide a function called "Age" that adds 1 year of life to the animals. It might also provide an abstract method called "IsDead" that, when called, will tell you if the animal has died. Since IsDead is abstract, each animal must implement it. So, a Cat might decide it is dead after it reaches 14 years of age, but a Duck might decide it dies after 5 years of age. The abstract class Animal provides the Age function to all classes that derive from it, but each of those classes has to implement IsDead on their own.

A business example:

I have a persistance engine that will work against any data sourcer (XML, ASCII (delimited and fixed-length), various JDBC sources (Oracle, SQL, ODBC, etc.) I created a base, abstract class to provide common functionality in this persistance, but instantiate the appropriate "Port" (subclass) when persisting my objects. (This makes development of new "Ports" much easier, since most of the work is done in the superclasses; especially the various JDBC ones; since I not only do persistance but other things [like table generation], I have to provide the various differences for each database.) The best business examples of Interfaces are the Collections. I can work with a java.util.List without caring how it is implemented; having the List as an abstract class does not make sense because there are fundamental differences in how anArrayList works as opposed to a LinkedList. Likewise, Map and Set. And if I am just working with a group of objects and don't care if it's a List, Map, or Set, I can just use the Collection interface.