What is a call back interface in Java?

Question

This code snippet for the interface SetObserver is taken from Effective Java (Avoid Excessive Synchronization Item 67)

public interface SetObserver<E> {
// Invoked when an element is added to the observable set
void added(ObservableSet<E> set, E element);
}

And the SetObserver is passed to addObserver() and removeObserver method as given below :

// Broken - invokes alien method from synchronized block!
public class ObservableSet<E> extends ForwardingSet<E> {
  public ObservableSet(Set<E> set) {
    super(set);
  }

  private final List<SetObserver<E>> observers =
      new ArrayList<SetObserver<E>>();

  public void addObserver(SetObserver<E> observer) {
    synchronized (observers) {
      observers.add(observer);
    }
  }



  public boolean removeObserver(SetObserver<E> observer) {
    synchronized (observers) {
      return observers.remove(observer);
    }
  }



  private void notifyElementAdded(E element) {
    synchronized (observers) {
      for (SetObserver<E> observer : observers)
        observer.added(this, element);
    }
  }

Bloch refers to the SetObserver<E> interface as a call back interface . When is a interface called an call back interface in Java?

Answer 1

A general requirement for an interface to be a "callback interface" is that the interface provides a way for the callee to invoke the code inside the caller. The main idea is that the caller has a piece of code that needs to be executed when something happens in the code of another component. Callback interfaces provide a way to pass this code to the component being called: the caller implements an interface, and the callee invokes one of its methods.

The callback mechanism may be implemented differently in different languages: C# has delegates and events in addition to callback interfaces, C has functions that can be passed by pointer, Objective C has delegate protocols, and so on. But the main idea is always the same: the caller passes a piece of code to be called upon occurrence of a certain event.