Implement collision detection by extendung the Rectangle class to use its contains and intersects methods

Question

I would like to know if this is a good idea that to implement simple 2D collision detection of rectangles as follows:

1. Make my own Collision detection class that extends Rectangle class.
2. Then when instantiating that object doing something such as Collision col = new Rectangle(); <- Should I do that or is that something that should be avoided? I am aware that I 'can' but should I?
3. I want to extend Rectangle class because of the contains() and intersects() methods; should I be doing that or should I be doing something else for 2D collision detection in Java?

Answer 1

you can easily extend Rectangle

class CollidableRectangle extends Rectangle
{
  public boolean isCollidingWith(Rectangle otherRect)
  {
    //check collision
  }

  // return all collisions
  public List<CollidableRectangle> getCollisions(List<Rectangle)
  {
    // code
  }
}

then you would use it like:

CollidableRectangle r1 = new CollidableRectangle();
CollidableRectangle r2 = new CollidableRectangle();

r1.isCollidingWith(r2);

//and so on

As noted in comments I didn't use a Collision class. Usually you need it because you are also interested in collision parameters like depth or colliding plane so you would have something like:

class Collision
{
   CollidableRectangle first, second;
   float depth;
   Line2D collidingLine;
}

and the method would return a list of collisions:

public List<Collision> getCollisions(List<Rectangle) { ... }