Dynamic Return Type in Java method

Question

I\'ve seen a question similar to this multiple times here, but there is one big difference.

In the other questions, the return type is to be determined by the parameter.

Answer 1

I don't know what these people are talking about. You lose type safety, which is a concern, but you could easily accomplish this with generics...something like:

public  T getSomething(...) { }

or

interface Wrapper { T getObject(); }

public  Wrapper getSomething(...) { }

The latter promotes the possibility of a strategy pattern. Pass the bytes to the strategy, let it execute and retrieve the output. You would have a Byte strategy, Boolean strategy, etc.

abstract class Strategy {
    final byte[] bytes;

    Strategy(byte[] bytes) { this.bytes = bytes; }

    protected abstract T execute();
}

then

class BooleanStrategy extends Strategy {
    public BooleanStrategy(byte[] bytes) { super(bytes); }

    @Override
    public Boolean execute() {
        return bytes[0] != 0;
    }

}

Your example code is a bad use case though and I wouldn't recommend it. Your method doesn't make much sense.