Chapter 1: Declarations and Access Control

We assume that because you're planning on becoming certified, you already know the basics of Java. If you're completely new to the language, this chapter—and the rest of the book—will be confusing; so be sure you know at least the basics of the language before diving into this book. That said, we're starting with a brief, high-level refresher to put you back in the Java mood, in case you've been away for awhile.

Java Refresher

A Java program is mostly a collection of objects talking to other objects by invoking each other's methods. Every object is of a certain type, and that type is defined by a class or an interface. Most Java programs use a collection of objects of many different types.

• Class A template that describes the kinds of state and behavior that objects of its type support.

• Object At runtime, when, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) encounters the new keyword, it will use the appropriate class to make an object which is an instance of that class. That object will have its own state, and access to all of the behaviors defined by its class.

• State (instance variables) Each object (instance of a class) will have its own unique set of instance variables as defined in the class. Collectively, the values assigned to an object's instance variables make up the object's state.

• Behavior (methods) When a programmer creates a class, she creates methods for that class. Methods are where the class' logic is stored. Methods are where the real work gets done. They are where algorithms get executed, and data gets manipulated.

Identifiers and Keywords

All the Java components we just talked about—classes, variables, and methods—need names. In Java these names are called identifiers, and, as you might expect, there are rules for what constitutes a legal Java identifier. Beyond what's legal, though, Java programmers (and Sun) have created conventions for naming methods, variables, and classes.

Like all programming languages, Java has a set of built-in keywords. These keywords must not be used as identifiers. Later in this chapter we'll review the details of these naming rules, conventions, and the Java keywords.

Inheritance

Central to Java and other object-oriented languages is the concept of inheritance, which allows code defined in one class to be reused in other classes. In Java, you can define a general (more abstract) superclass, and then extend it with more specific subclasses. The superclass knows nothing of the classes that inherit from it, but all of the subclasses that inherit from the superclass must explicitly declare the inheritance relationship. A subclass that inherits from a superclass is automatically given accessible instance variables and methods defined by the superclass, but is also free to override superclass methods to define more specific behavior.

For example, a Car superclass class could define general methods common to all automobiles, but a Ferrari subclass could override the accelerate() method.

Interfaces

A powerful companion to inheritance is the use of interfaces. Interfaces are like a 100-percent abstract superclass that defines the methods a subclass must support, but not how they must be supported. In other words, an Animal interface might declare that all Animal implementation classes have an eat() method, but the Animal interface doesn't supply any logic for the eat() method. That means it's up to the classes that implement the Animal interface to define the actual code for how that particular Animal type behaves when its eat() method is invoked.

Finding Other Classes

As we'll see later in the book, it's a good idea to make your classes cohesive. That means that every class should have a focused set of responsibilities. For instance, if you were creating a zoo simulation program, you'd want to represent aardvarks with one class, and zoo visitors with a different class. In addition, you might have a Zookeeper class, and a Popcorn vendor class. The point is that you don't want a class that has both Aardvark and Popcorn behaviors (more on that in Chapter 2).

Even a simple Java program uses objects from many different classes: some that you created, and some built by others (such as Sun's Java API classes). Java organizes classes into packages, and uses import statements to give programmers a consistent way to manage naming of, and access to, classes they need. The exam covers a lot of concepts related to packages and class access; we'll explore the details in this—and later—chapters.