Defining a Class in Java (What It Means to Be an Account)

Java lets you define a class. What does that mean? Think of it this way. What distinguishes one bank account from another? If you ask a banker this question, you hear a long sales pitch. The banker describes interest rates, fees, penalties — the whole routine. Don’t worry, for this example, you don’t need to know all of that.

Instead, you want to know how my account is different from your account. After all, my account is named Barry Burd, trading as Burd Brain Consulting, and your account is named Jane Q. Reader, trading as Budding Java Expert. My account has $24.02 in it. How about yours?

When you come right down to it, the differences between one account and another can be summarized as values of variables. Maybe there’s a variable named balance . For me, the value of balance is 24.02 . For you, the value of balance is 55.63 . The question is, when writing a computer program to deal with accounts, how do I separate my balance variable from your balance variable?

The answer is to create two separate objects. Let one balance variable live inside one of the objects and let the other balance variable live inside the other object. While you’re at it, put a name variable and an address variable in each of the objects. And there you have it: two objects, and each object represents an account. More precisely, each object is an instance of the Account class.

So far, so good. However, you still haven’t solved the original problem. In your computer program, how do you refer to my balance variable, as opposed to your balance variable? Well, you have two objects sitting around, so maybe you have variables to refer to these two objects. Create one variable named myAccount and another variable named yourAccount. The myAccount variable refers to my object (my instance of the Account class) with all the stuff that’s inside it. To refer to my balance, write

myAccount.balance

To refer to my name, write

myAccount.name

Then yourAccount.balance refers to the value in your object’s balance variable, and yourAccount.name refers to the value of your object’s name variable. To tell Java how much I have in my account, you can write

myAccount.balance = 24.02;

To display your name on the screen, you can write

out.println(yourAccount.name);

What it means to be an account.

public class Account {

String name;

String address;

double balance;

}

The Account class defines what it means to be an Account. In particular, this code tells you that each of the Account class’s instances has three variables: name, address, and balance. This is consistent with the information in the image above.1. Java programmers have a special name for variables of this kind (variables that belong to instances of classes). Each of these variables — name, address, and balance — is called a field.

A variable declared inside a class but not inside any particular method is a field. The variables name, address, and balance are fields. Another name for a field is an instance variable.

Can you really define a complete Java class with only four lines of code (give or take a curly brace)? You certainly can. A class is a grouping of existing things. In the Account class, those existing things are two String values and a double value.

The field declarations have default access, which means that a word wasn’t added before the type name String. The alternatives to default access are public, protected, and private access:

public String name;

protected String address;

private double balance;

Professional programmers shun the use of default access because default access doesn't shield a field from accidental misuse. But, you learn best when you learn about the simplest stuff first, and in Java, default access is the simplest stuff.