I've been working on this program for a few days now and I've implemented a few of the primary methods in my BinarySearchTree class such as insert and delete. Insert seemed to be working fine, but once I try to delete I kept getting errors. So after playing around with the code I wanted to test my compareTo methods. I created two new nodes and tried to compare them and I get this error:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ClassCastException: TreeNode cannot be cast to java.lang.Integer at java.lang.Integer.compareTo(Unknown Source) at TreeNode.compareTo(TreeNode.java:16) at BinarySearchTree.myComparision(BinarySearchTree.java:177) at main.main(main.java:14)

Here is my class for creating the nodes:

    public class TreeNode<T> implements Comparable
    {
        protected TreeNode<T> left, right;
        protected Object element;

    public TreeNode(Object obj)
    {
        element=obj;
        left=null;
        right=null;
    }

   public int compareTo(Object node)
   {
       return ((Comparable) this.element).compareTo(node);
   }

}

Am I doing the compareTo method all wrong? I would like to create trees that can handle integers and strings (seperatly of course)