>Im a little confused about these. in particular the methods Class.forName() Class.newInstance() Object.clone() and class literals. It seems to have something to do with not knowing the exact type when you want to instantiate an class right?
Yes. basically, you can get the parameter (which would be the name of a class) to these methods at RunTime and so can instatiate that class without knowing it's name at compile time.
>Correct me if i am wrong. Class.forName(Integer) and Integer.class create not an Integer object but a reference to the Class object associated with the Integer class??
Yes.
>What good is the clone method why not just use new.
Well, that depends on how much state information your object holds. For. eg. You instantiated an object (using new) say 10 LOCs before and you called a few computation intensive methods on it and now, the object contains a lot of generated data.
If you want to create a copy (clone?) of the same object then either you can new the class and call all the same computation intensive methods (& probab. wait for 5 mins) OR just clone it!
Do see see the point?
HTH,
Paul.
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