I've been looking into empty interfaces and abstract classes and from what I have read, they are generally bad practice. I intend to use them as the foundation for a small search application that I am writing. I would write the initial search provider and others would be allowed to create their own providers as well. My code's intent is enforce relationships between the classes for anyone who would like to implement them.
Can someone chime in and describe if and why this is still a bad practice and what, if any alternatives are available.
namespace Api.SearchProviders
{
public abstract class ListingSeachResult
{
public abstract string GetResultsAsJSON();
}
public abstract class SearchParameters
{
}
public interface IListingSearchProvider
{
ListingSeachResult SearchListings(SearchParameters p);
}
}