In: Computer Science
What does “program to interfaces, not implementations” mean?
Interfaces are just contracts or signatures and they don't know anything about implementations. Coding against interface means, the client code always holds an Interface object which is supplied by a factory. Any instance returned by the factory would be of type Interface which any factory candidate class must have implemented. This way the client program is not worried about implementation and the interface signature determines what all operations can be done. This can be used to change the behavior of a program at run-time. It also helps you to write far better programs from the maintenance point of view.