Alternatives to static methods on interfaces for enforcing consistency

Question

In Java, I\'d like to be able to define marker interfaces, that forced implementations to provide static methods. For example, for simple text-serialization/deserialization

Answer 1

Just an idea to consider: You can separate the transformation logic from the objects themselves, and then you have a fixed set of transformers, implementing the following interface :

public interface Transformer{ 

  public T fromText(String text); 

  public String toText(T obj); 
}

Your actual data classes can have a method getTransformer() that returns the right transformer for them.