Friday, December 16, 2011

Java classes, objects, and instances demystified (hopefully)

A great many people are competent java developers, but have only a vague understanding of the difference between a "public static method", "public method", and the difference between a class and an object. As this was confusing to me at first, I thought I would give a quick overview.

A class defines a template for what data and operations are available when you tell the JVM to create an object.

So, for example:

public class BlogPost {
    public String text = "";
    public static BlogPost latest;
    public static BlogPost create(String input) {
        latest = new BlogPost();
        latest.text = input;
        return latest;
    public int getTextSize() {
       return text.length();

When you compile this class, it is creating a file that the java runtime can later use to enable programmers to load an object into memory that has a single attribute called "text" which is a reference to another object with a class of String. Additionally, the class itself has an attribute called latest that is a reference to an object with a class of BlogPost, a method called create that accepts a reference to a string, creates a new Blogpost, stores it to the "latest" class variable, set's the text attribute on the "latest" class variable and subsequently returns the reference to "latest". In addition, there is an instance method called "getTextSize()" that returns the result of the instance method "length" for the "text" instance variable of the object.

So far, if you've done any amount of java programming, this shouldn't be too shocking or eye opening. However, there are some subtle and not-no-subtle nuances that are at play here. First and most commonly confused is that static methods cannot get access to instance variables.


Let's talk through this.... when java is running, class definitions are broken into two pieces. The data piece and the method piece. The data piece is independent for every new instance, the method piece is identical for every instance created and unique for the particular class. The method you can call on a particular class are unique to the CLASS, not the instance of the class. In addition, static variables on the class are also unique to the CLASS, not the instance. So, for example, the method area for our "BlogPost" has two method references... one for "create" which expects to receive a String reference and will return a BlogPost reference, and one for getTextSize, which expects to receive a reference to a BlogPost instance an will return the integer value of the text field reference stored on the BlogPost reference it received

When we are in the create method, there is no BlogPost instance available to look at... since the "length" method and the "text" instance variable both need a copy of a BlogPost object loaded into memory ... there's no way to access them.

Put another way, When you define an instance method, even though you don't tell the JVM, it automatically knows that it MUST have a reference to it's defining class already loaded into memory (BlogPost) in order to perform it's operations.

This gets to the heart of what I think a lot of people don't get about java (not ALL languages/VMs do it this way, but java DOES). Another way to code the getTextSize() method above would be to do this:

    public static int getTextSize(BlogPost myPost) {
        return myPost.text.length();

Some people would think that this method is more effecient because you don't "waste" memory having all kinds of copies of the function loaded into memory. The fact is, java is not that naive, ALL methods are effectively singletons and there will only ever be one copy of the method implementation in memory. When you call instance methods, you're simply telling java that you want to make sure this method ALWAYS REQUIRES an instance of my class as an implicit parameter. In addition, the language has a nice way of defining this were you don't have to explicitly pass the instance as a parameter. There really is no difference at runtime between the memory consumption of the two implementations.

For a little more discussion, take a look at Stack Overflow . Hopefully this will help clarify things for some folks.


Anonymous said...

While your blog post gives a good introduction to the concepts, I don't think that someone can be a competent java developer if they don't understand the difference between a "public static method", "public method", and the difference between a class and an object."

Mike Mainguy said...

Philosophically I agree, however I've worked in places where the best I could do was hope to work with the least incompetent developers I could find. If you're not in the Valley, go ahead an interview 20 people for a "java developer" job posting and let me know if you agree...