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

If you are running in Java 5 or higher, you can use the enum type - all of those are, by definition, singletons. So you could something like:

public enum MyEnumType {
    Type1,
    Type2,
    //....
    TypeN;

    //you can do whatever you want down here
    //including implementing interfaces that the enum conforms to.

}

This way the memory problem goes away, and you can have single instances of behavior implemented.

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Edit: If you don't have access to enums (1.4 or earlier) or, for some other reason, they don't work for you, I would recommend a Flyweight pattern implementation.