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

A totally different approach (and an ugly hack, for that matter) is to let the interface have a method that returns a method.

public interface MyInterface{
    Method getConvertMethod();
}

now your client code can do

yourInterface.getConvertMethod().invoke(objectToBeConverted);

This is extremely powerful, but very bad API design

Sean