is class a static member?

[Kaarthick Ramamoorthy]

Hi all,

In the following code, How Test.class works? Is that class is a static member of Test or Object?. Please clarify me.

 package common;
 
public class Test {
 
public static void main(String[] args) {
System.out.println(Test.class);
}
}

Thanks in advance
Kaarthick

[Marco Ehrentreich]

Hi,

the Class objects you're talking about are somewhat special. They are dynamically created by the class loader in the JVM of an application at runtime the first time a class is used (take care of upper case names: Class is the class named "Class").

The ".class" language construct is neither a static member of Object nor of Test. It's a Java language feature called class literal!

There's one Class object created per class and all Class objects belong to class Class (sounds funny ).

Your example Test.class is the same as Class<Test> using generics. Other usual ways for retrieving a Class object is to use the Class.forName() method so that the JVM actually has to load a class. Or if you have already an object of your class type you can use the getClass() method inherited from Object.

I hope now it's a bit clearer... Oh, perhaps you want to take a look at the API doc of class Class.

Marco
[ March 27, 2008: Message edited by: Marco Ehrentreich ]

[Kaarthick Ramamoorthy]

Thanks for your interesting information.