Chapter 8

Classes and Objects: A Deeper Look

Java How to Program, 11/e, Global Edition
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8.1 Introduction
 Deeper look at building classes, controlling access to members of a
class and creating constructors.
 Show how to throw an exception to indicate that a problem has

occurred.
 Composition—a capability that allows a class to have references to

objects of other classes as members.

 More details on enum types.
 Discuss static class members and final instance variables in

detail.
 Show how to organize classes in packages to help manage large

applications and promote reuse.

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8.2 Time Class Case Study
 Class Time1 represents the time of day.
 private int instance variables hour, minute and second

represent the time in universal-time format (24-hour clock format in

which hours are in the range 0–23, and minutes and seconds are each
in the range 0–59).
 public methods setTime, toUniversalString and toString.

◦ Called the public services or the public interface that the class provides to its
clients.

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8.2 Time Class Case Study (Cont.)
 Class Time1 does not declare a constructor, so the compiler supplies
a default constructor.
 Each instance variable implicitly receives the default int value.
 Instance variables also can be initialized when they are declared in

the class body, using the same initialization syntax as with a local
variable.

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8.2 Time Class Case Study (Cont.)
Method setTime and Throwing Exceptions
 Method setTime declares three int parameters and uses them to

set the time.

 Lines 13–14 test each argument to determine whether the value is

outside the proper range.

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8.2 Time Class Case Study (Cont.)
Method setTime and Throwing Exceptions (cont.)
 For incorrect values, setTime throws an exception of type

IllegalArgumentException
◦ Notifies the client code that an invalid argument was passed to the method.
◦ Can use try...catch to catch exceptions and attempt to recover from them.
◦ The class instance creation expression in the throw statement creates a new
object of type IllegalArgumentException. In this case, we call the
constructor that allows us to specify a custom error message.
◦ After the exception object is created, the throw statement immediately
terminates method setTime and the exception is returned to the calling
method that attempted to set the time.

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8.2 Time Class Case Study (Cont.)
Software Engineering of the Time1 Class Declaration
 The instance variables hour, minute and second are each declared

private.
 The actual data representation used within the class is of no concern to

the class’s clients.

 Reasonable for Time1 to represent the time internally as the number

of seconds since midnight or the number of minutes and seconds since

midnight.
 Clients could use the same public methods and get the same results

without being aware of this.

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8.2 Time Class Case Study (Cont.)
Java SE 8—Date/Time API
 Rather than building your own date and time classes, you’ll typically reuse the

ones provided by the Java API.

 Java SE 8 introduces a new Date/Time API—defined by the classes in the

package java.time—applications built with Java SE 8 should use the Date/Time

API’s capabilities, rather than those in earlier Java versions.
◦ fixes various issues with the older classes and provides more robust, easier-to-use
capabilities for manipulating dates, times, time zones, calendars and more.
 We use some Date/Time API features in Chapter 23.
 Learn more about the Date/Time API’s classes at:
◦ download.java.net/jdk8/docs/api/java/time/
package-summary.html

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8.3 Controlling Access to Members
 Access modifiers public and private control access to a class’s
variables and methods.
◦ Chapter 9 introduces access modifier protected.
 public methods present to the class’s clients a view of the services
the class provides (the class’s public interface).
 Clients need not be concerned with how the class accomplishes its

tasks.
◦ For this reason, the class’s private variables and private methods (i.e., its
implementation details) are not accessible to its clients.
 private class members are not accessible outside the class.

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8.4 Referring to the Current Object’s Members with the
this Reference
 Every object can access a reference to itself with keyword this.
 When a an instance method is called for a particular object, the

method’s body implicitly uses keyword this to refer to the object’s

instance variables and other methods.
◦ Enables the class’s code to know which object should be manipulated.
◦ Can also use keyword this explicitly in an instance method’s body.
 Can use the this reference implicitly and explicitly.

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8.4 Referring to the Current Object’s Members with the
this Reference (Cont.)
 When you compile a .java file containing more than one class, the
compiler produces a separate class file with the .class extension for
every compiled class.
 When one source-code (.java) file contains multiple class

declarations, the compiler places both class files for those classes in the
same directory.
 A source-code file can contain only one public class—otherwise, a

compilation error occurs.

 Non-public classes can be used only by other classes in the same

package.

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8.4 Referring to the Current Object’s Members with the
this Reference (Cont.)
 SimpleTime declares three private instance variables—hour,
minute and second.
 If parameter names for the constructor that are identical to the

class’s instance-variable names.

 We use the this reference to refer to the instance variables.

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8.5 Time Class Case Study: Overloaded Constructors
 Overloaded constructors enable objects of a class to be initialized in
different ways.
 To overload constructors, simply provide multiple constructor

declarations with different signatures.

 Recall that the compiler differentiates signatures by the number of

parameters, the types of the parameters and the order of the

parameter types in each signature.

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8.5 Time Class Case Study: Overloaded Constructors
(Cont.)
 Class Time2 (Fig. 8.5) contains five overloaded constructors that
provide convenient ways to initialize objects.
 The compiler invokes the appropriate constructor by matching the

number, types and order of the types of the arguments specified in

the constructor call with the number, types and order of the types of
the parameters specified in each constructor declaration.

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8.5 Time Class Case Study: Overloaded Constructors
(Cont.)
 Using this as shown here is a popular way to reuse initialization
code provided by another of the class’s constructors
 A constructor that calls another constructor in this manner is known

as a delegating constructor
 Makes the class easier to maintain and modify

◦ If we need to change how objects of class Time2 are initialized, only the
constructor that the class’s other constructors call will need to be modified

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8.5 Time Class Case Study: Overloaded Constructors
(Cont.)
 A program can declare a so-called no-argument constructor that is
invoked without arguments.
 Such a constructor simply initializes the object as specified in the

constructor’s body.
 Using this in method-call syntax as the first statement in a

constructor’s body invokes another constructor of the same class.

◦ Popular way to reuse initialization code provided by another of the class’s
constructors rather than defining similar code in the no-argument
constructor’s body.
 Once you declare any constructors in a class, the compiler will not
provide a default constructor.
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8.5 Time Class Case Study: Overloaded Constructors
(Cont.)
Notes Regarding Class Time2’s set and get Methods and Constructors
 Methods can access a class’s private data directly without calling the get methods.

 However, consider changing the representation of the time from three int values

(requiring 12 bytes of memory) to a single int value representing the total

number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight (requiring only four bytes of
memory).
◦ If we made such a change, only the bodies of the methods that access the
private data directly would need to change—in particular, the three-argument
constructor, the setTime method and the individual set and get methods for
the hour, minute and second.
◦ There would be no need to modify the bodies of methods
toUniversalString or toString because they do not access the data
directly.
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8.5 Time Class Case Study: Overloaded Constructors
(Cont.)
 Designing the class in this manner reduces the likelihood of
programming errors when altering the class’s implementation.
 Similarly, each Time2 constructor could be written to include a copy

of the appropriate statements from the three-argument constructor.

◦ Doing so may be slightly more efficient, because the extra constructor calls are
eliminated.
◦ But, duplicating statements makes changing the class’s internal data
representation more difficult.
◦ Having the Time2 constructors call the constructor with three arguments
requires any changes to the implementation of the three-argument
constructor be made only once.

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8.6 Default and No-Argument Constructors
 Every class must have at least one constructor.
 If you do not provide any constructors in a class’s declaration, the compiler
creates a default constructor that takes no arguments when it’s invoked.
 The default constructor initializes the instance variables to the initial values
specified in their declarations or to their default values (zero for primitive
numeric types, false for boolean values and null for references).
 Recall that if your class declares constructors, the compiler will not create a
default constructor.
◦ In this case, you must declare a no-argument constructor if default
initialization is required.
◦ Like a default constructor, a no-argument constructor is invoked with empty
parentheses.
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8.6 Constructors

 Video Lectures : Object Oriented Programming Using Java by Sir Asif

Shahzad, Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, CUI
Lahore
◦ Lec08 - OOP/Java Constructors - YouTube

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8.7 Notes on Set and Get Methods
 Set methods are also commonly called mutator methods, because
they typically change an object’s state—i.e., modify the values of
instance variables.
 Get methods are also commonly called accessor methods or query

methods.

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8.7 Notes on Set and Get Methods (Cont.)
 It would seem that providing set and get capabilities is essentially
the same as making a class’s instance variables public.
◦ A public instance variable can be read or written by any method that has a
reference to an object that contains that variable.
◦ If an instance variable is declared private, a public get method certainly
allows other methods to access it, but the get method can control how the
client can access it.
◦ A public set method can—and should—carefully scrutinize attempts to
modify the variable’s value to ensure valid values.
 Although set and get methods provide access to private data, it is
restricted by the implementation of the methods.

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8.7 Notes on Set and Get Methods (Cont.)
Validity Checking in Set Methods
 The benefits of data integrity do not follow automatically simply

because instance variables are declared private—you must

provide validity checking.
Predicate Methods
 Another common use for accessor methods is to test whether a

condition is true or false—such methods are often called predicate

methods.
◦ Example: ArrayList’s isEmpty method, which returns true if the
ArrayList is empty and false otherwise.

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8.8 Composition
 A class can have references to objects of other classes as members.
 This is called composition and is sometimes referred to as a has-a

relationship.
 Example: An AlarmClock object needs to know the current time

and the time when it’s supposed to sound its alarm, so it’s
reasonable to include two references to Time objects in an
AlarmClock object.

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8.8 Composition
 Video Lectures : Object Oriented Programming Using Java by Sir Asif
Shahzad, Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, CUI
Lahore
◦ Lec11 - Composition in Object Oriented Programming, Java (Urdu / Hindi) (yo
utube.com)

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8.9 enum Types
 The basic enum type defines a set of constants represented as
unique identifiers.
 Like classes, all enum types are reference types.
 An enum type is declared with an enum declaration, which is a

comma-separated list of enum constants

 The declaration may optionally include other components of

traditional classes, such as constructors, fields and methods.

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8.9 Enum Types (Cont.)
 Each enum declaration declares an enum class with the following
restrictions:
◦ enum constants are implicitly final.
◦ enum constants are implicitly static.
◦ Any attempt to create an object of an enum type with operator new results in
a compilation error.
 enum constants can be used anywhere constants can be used, such
as in the case labels of switch statements and to control enhanced
for statements.

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8.9 Enum Types (Cont.)
 enum declarations contain two parts—the enum constants and the
other members of the enum type.
 An enum constructor can specify any number of parameters and can

be overloaded.
 For every enum, the compiler generates the static method

values that returns an array of the enum’s constants.

 When an enum constant is converted to a String, the constant’s

identifier is used as the String representation.

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8.9 Enum Types (Cont.)
 Use the static method range of class EnumSet (declared in
package java.util) to access a range of an enum’s constants.
◦ Method range takes two parameters—the first and the last enum constants
in the range
◦ Returns an EnumSet that contains all the constants between these two
constants, inclusive.
 The enhanced for statement can be used with an EnumSet just as
it can with an array.
 Class EnumSet provides several other static methods.

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8.9 Enum Types (Cont.)
 Video Lectures : Object Oriented Programming Using Java by Sir Asif
Shahzad, Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, CUI
Lahore
◦ Lec17.1 - Enums Introduction – YouTube
◦ Lec17.3 - How to add methods and attributes in Enum constants (youtube.co
m)

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8.11 static Class Members
 In certain cases, only one copy of a particular variable should be
shared by all objects of a class.
◦ A static field—called a class variable—is used in such cases.
 A static variable represents classwide information—all objects of
the class share the same piece of data.
◦ The declaration of a static variable begins with the keyword static.

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8.11 static Class Members (Cont.)
 Static variables have class scope—they can be used in all of the class’s methods.
 Can access a class’s public static members through a reference to any object of the
class, or by qualifying the member name with the class name and a dot (.), as in
Math.random().
 private static class members can be accessed by client code only through methods
of the class.
 static class members are available as soon as the class is loaded into memory at
execution time.
 To access a public static member when no objects of the class exist (and even when
they do), prefix the class name and a dot (.) to the static member, as in Math.PI.
 To access a private static member when no objects of the class exist, provide a
public static method and call it by qualifying its name with the class name and a dot.

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8.11 static Class Members (Cont.)
 A static method cannot access a class’s instance variables and
instance methods, because a static method can be called even
when no objects of the class have been instantiated.
◦ For the same reason, the this reference cannot be used in a static method.
◦ The this reference must refer to a specific object of the class, and when a
static method is called, there might not be any objects of its class in
memory.
 If a static variable is not initialized, the compiler assigns it a
default value—in this case 0, the default value for type int.

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8.11 static Class Members (Cont.)
 String objects in Java are immutable—they cannot be modified
after they are created.
◦ Therefore, it’s safe to have many references to one String object.
◦ This is not normally the case for objects of most other classes in Java.
 If String objects are immutable, you might wonder why are we
able to use operators + and += to concatenate String objects.
 String-concatenation actually results in a new String object

containing the concatenated values—the original String objects

are not modified.

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8.11 static Class Members (Cont.)
 In a typical app, the garbage collector might eventually reclaim the
memory for any objects that are eligible for collection.
 The JVM does not guarantee when, or even whether, the garbage

collector will execute.

 When the garbage collector does execute, it’s possible that no objects

or only a subset of the eligible objects will be collected.

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8.11b static Initialization Block

• Java supports a special block, called a static block (also called

static clause) that can be used for static initialization of a class.
• Can access only static class methods/variables.
• Whenever we use a static keyword and associate it to a block
then that block is referred to as a static block.
• This code inside the static block is executed only once: it is called
automatically the first time the class is loaded into memory.
• Remember: Static blocks can also be executed even before constructors.

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8.11b static Initialization Block (cont.)
// Java Program to Illustrate How Static block is Called

class Test {

// Static variable
static int i;

// Start of static block

static {
i = 10;
System.out.println("static block called ");
}
// End of static block
}

// Test class
class GFG {
public static void main(String args[]) {
// Although we don't have an object of Test, static
// block is called automatically.
System.out.println(Test.i);
}
}
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8.11b static Initialization Block (cont.)
• The static block only gets called once, when the class itself is initialized, no
matter how many objects of that type you create.
• We can also create a non-static initialization block, which is executed each time
an object is created.
• No matter which constructor of the class is called, the non-static
initialization block is called for every object.
The non-static block:
{
// can access both static and non-static members
}
• Gets called every time an instance of the class is constructed.

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Non-static Initialization Block (Cont.)

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8.11b static Initialization Block (cont.)

 Video Lectures : Object Oriented Programming Using Java by Sir Asif

Shahzad, Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, CUI
Lahore
◦ Lec10 - OOP/Java Static Variables, Methods and Blocks (Urdu / Hindi) - YouTu
be

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8.12 static Import
 A static import declaration enables you to import the static
members of a class or interface so you can access them via their
unqualified names in your class—that is, the class name and a dot (.)
are not required when using an imported static member.
 Two forms

◦ One that imports a particular static member (which is known as single

static import)
◦ One that imports all static members of a class (which is known as static
import on demand)

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8.12 static Import (Cont.)
 The following syntax imports a particular static member:
import static packageName.ClassName.staticMemberName;
 where packageName is the package of the class, ClassName is the name of the
class and staticMemberName is the name of the static field or method.
 The following syntax imports all static members of a class:
import static packageName.ClassName.*;
 packageName is the package of the class and ClassName is the name of the class.
◦ * indicates that all static members of the specified class should be available
for use in the class(es) declared in the file.
 static import declarations import only static class members.
 Regular import statements should be used to specify the classes used in a
program.
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8.13 final Instance Variables
 The principle of least privilege is fundamental to good software
engineering.
◦ Code should be granted only the amount of privilege and access that it needs to
accomplish its designated task, but no more.
◦ Makes your programs more robust by preventing code from accidentally (or
maliciously) modifying variable values and calling methods that should not be
accessible.
 Keyword final specifies that a variable is not modifiable (i.e., it’s a
constant) and any attempt to modify it will result in an error once a
final variable is initialized.
private final int INCREMENT;
◦ Declares a final (constant) instance variable INCREMENT of type int.
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8.13 final Instance Variables (cont.)
 final instance variables can be initialized when they are declared
◦ In this case the value of the instance variable will be the same for each
instantiated object of that class.
 We may also initialize final instance variables class’s constructors so
that each object of the class has a different value (e.g., CNIC)
◦ If a class provides multiple constructors, every one would be required to
initialize that final variable in this case.
 A final instance variable may also be initialized in non-static block.
◦ Once initialized in a non-static block, it can’t be initialized by a constructor
 In all cases, a final variable cannot be modified by assignment
after it’s initialized.
 If a final variable is not initialized, a compilation error occurs.
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8.13 final static Variables
 final static variables (class wide final variables) can be initialized
when they are declared
 final static variables may also be initialized in static block(s).
 They can not be initialized by using constructor(s)

◦ They are created only once at the time of class loading

 A final static variable cannot be modified by assignment after it’s
initialized.

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8.13 final local Variables
 final local variables can be declared and initialized in the method
body
 final local variables can be initialized at the same time when they

are declared (or)

◦ Declaration and initialization can be done in separate statements.
◦ Like other final variables, a final local variable cannot be modified further
by assignment later on once it’s initialized.
 A method parameter can also be declared final while receiving and
copying the value of an argument passed through the method calls

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8.13 final Instance Variables (cont.)
 Video Lectures : Object Oriented Programming Using Java by Sir Asif
Shahzad, Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, CUI
Lahore
◦ Lec16.8 - final variables (also called constants) (youtube.com)

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<< Home Tasks >>

 Prepare the Self Review Exercise Questions: 8.1

 Complete the Programming Exercises: 8.6, 8.7, 8.8, 8.10, 8.15
 Suggested Programming Exercise(s) for Assignment Grading: 8.18

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