More about classes

                          General Form of a Class      

So a “class” in java is a fundamental building block of a program or in simple words I can say that it is a name given to the program.

There may exist a question that “Why would one give a name to a program using “class” while the purpose of the program is to get execute and just run on a machine”. The above statement could be true in some cases; for example consider in C Language we will not mention any class name there, all we do is to write and run the code.

But remember that C is a structure-Oriented language and Java is a Object-Oriented Language. So, by naming the class in java you are able to implement the features of OOP like Abstraction, Encapsulation and Data hiding.

You will see how we use class names to implement these OOP principles mentioned above in further posts.

For now consider the below picture which depicts the generalized form of class

The instance-variables are the member fields of the class. They show the characteristics of the class.

The methods could be declared inside the class and could be accessed within the class. If any other class wants to access these members then that particular class should create an object of the class whose members it needs to access.

The Object creation will be discussed in the next post.

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