6.6 Inner Classes

Java 1.1 adds to the language a large heap of syntactic sugar called inner classes. Simply put, classes in Java can be declared at any level of scope. That is, you can declare a class within any set of curly braces (i.e., almost anywhere that you could put any other Java statement), and its visibility is limited to that scope in the same way that the name of a variable or method would be. Inner classes are a powerful and aesthetically pleasing facility for structuring code. Their even sweeter cousins, anonymous inner classes, are another powerful shorthand that make it seem like you can create classes dynamically within Java's statically typed environment.

However, if you delve into the inner workings of Java, inner classes are not quite as aesthetically pleasing or dynamic. We said that they are syntactic sugar; this means that they let you leverage the compiler by writing a few lines of code that trigger a lot of behind-the-scenes work somewhere between the compiler's front end and the byte-code. Inner classes rely on code generation; they are a feature of the Java language, but not of the Java virtual machine. As a programmer you may never need be aware of this; you can simply rely on inner classes like any other language construct. However, you should know a little about how inner classes work, to better understand the results and a few potential side effects.

To this point, all of our classes have been top level classes. We have declared them, free standing, at the package level. Inner classes are essentially nested classes, like this:

    Class Animal {
        Class Brain { 
            ...
        }
    }

Here the class Brain is an inner class: it is a class declared inside the scope of class Animal. Although the details of what that means require a fair bit of explanation, we'll start by saying that the Java language tries to make the meaning, as much as possible, the same as for the other Java entities (methods and variables) living at that level of scope. For example, let's add a method to the Animal class:

    Class Animal {
        Class Brain { 
            ...
        }
        void performBehavior() { ... }
    }

Both the inner class Brain and the method performBehavior() are within the scope of Animal. Therefore, anywhere within Animal we can refer to Brain and performBehavior() directly, by name. Within Animal we can call the constructor for Brain (new Brain()) to get a Brain object, or invoke performBehavior() to carry out that method's function. But neither Brain nor performBehavior() are accessible outside of the class Animal without some additional qualification.

Within the body of the Brain class and the body of the performBehavior() method, we have direct access to all of the other methods and variables of the Animal class. So, just as the performBehavior() method could work with the Brain class and create instances of Brain, code within the Brain class can invoke the performBehavior() method of Animal as well as work with any other methods and variables declared in Animal.

That last bit has important consequences. From within Brain we can invoke the method performBehavior(); that is, from within an instance of Brain we can invoke the performBehavior() method of an instance of Animal. Well, which instance of Animal? If we have several Animal objects around (say, a few Cats and Dogs), we need to know whose performBehavior() method we are calling. What does it mean for a class definition to be "inside" another class definition? The answer is that a Brain object always lives within a single instance of Animal: the one that it was told about when it was created. We'll call the object that contains any instance of Brain its enclosing instance.

A Brain object cannot live outside of an enclosing instance of an Animal object. Anywhere you see an instance of Brain, it will be tethered to an instance of Animal. Although it is possible to construct a Brain object from elsewhere (i.e., another class), Brain always requires an enclosing instance of Animal to "hold" it. We'll also say now that if Brain is to be referred to from outside of Animal, it acts something like an Animal.Brain class. And just as with the performBehavior() method, modifiers can be applied to restrict its visibility. There is even an interpretation of the static modifier, which we'll talk about a bit later. However, the details are somewhat boring and not immediately useful, so you should consult a full language reference for more info (like O'Reilly's Java Language Reference, Second Edition). Before we get too far afield, let's turn to a more compelling example.

A particularly important use of inner classes is to make adapter classes. An adapter class is a "helper" class that ties one class to another in a very specific way. Using adapter classes, you can write your classes more naturally, without having to anticipate every conceivable user's needs in advance. Instead, you provide adapter classes that marry your class to a particular interface. As an example, let's say that we have an EmployeeList object:

public class EmployeeList {
    private Employee [] employees = ... ;
    ...
}

EmployeeList holds information about a set of employees, representing some view of our database. Let's say that we would like to have EmployeeList provide its elements as an enumeration. An enumeration is a simple interface to a set of objects that looks like this:

// the java.util.Enumeration interface
public interface Enumeration {
    boolean hasMoreElements();
    Object nextElement();
}

It lets us iterate through its elements, asking for the next one and testing to see if more remain. The enumeration is a good candidate for an adapter class because it is an interface that our EmployeeList can't readily implement itself. That's because an enumeration is a "one way," disposable view of our data. It isn't intended to be reset and used again, and therefore should be kept separate from the EmployeeList itself. This is crying out for a simple class to provide the enumeration capability. But what should that class look like?

Well, before we knew about inner classes, our only recourse would have been to make a new "top level" class. We would probably feel obliged to call it EmployeeListEnumeration:

class EmployeeListEnumeration implements Enumeration {
    // lots of knowledge about EmployeeList
    ...
}

Here we have a comment representing the machinery that the EmployeeListEnumeration requires. Think for just a second about what you'd have to do to implement that machinery. The resulting class would be completely coupled to the EmployeeList and unusable in other situations. Worse, to function it must have access to the inner workings of EmployeeList. We would have to allow EmployeeListEnumeration access to the private array in EmployeeList, exposing this data more widely than it should be. This is less than ideal.

This sounds like a job for inner classes. We already said that EmployeeListEnumeration was useless without the EmployeeList; this sounds a lot like the "lives inside" relationship we described earlier. Furthermore, an inner class lets us avoid the encapsulation problem, because it can access all the members of its enclosing instance. Therefore, if we use an inner class to implement the enumeration, the array employees can remain private, invisible outside the EmployeeList. So let's just shove that helper class inside the scope of our EmployeeList:

public class EmployeeList {
    private Employee [] employees = ... ;
    
    // ...
    
    class Enumerator implements java.util.Enumeration {
        int element = 0;
        boolean hasMoreElements() {
            return  element < employees.length ;
        }
        Object nextElement() {
            if ( hasMoreElements() )
                return employees[ element++ ];
            else 
                throw new NoSuchElementException();
        }
    }
}

Now EmployeeList can provide an accessor method like the following to let other classes work with the list:

    ...
    Enumeration getEnumeration() {
        return new Enumerator();
    }

One effect of the move is that we are free to be a little more familiar in the naming of our enumeration class. Since it is no longer a top level class, we can give it a name that is appropriate only within the EmployeeList. In this case, we've named it Enumerator to emphasize what it does--but we don't need a name like EmployeeEnumerator that shows the relationship to the EmployeeList class because that's implicit. We've also filled in the guts of the Enumerator class. As you can see, now that it is inside the scope of EmployeeList, Enumerator has direct access to its private members, so it can directly access the employees array. This greatly simplifies the code and maintains the compile-time safety.

Before we move on, we should note that inner classes can have constructors, even though we didn't need one in this example. They are in all respects real classes.

    Class Animal {
        void performBehavior() { 
            Class Brain { 
                ...
            }
        }
    }

    class Animal  {
        static class MigrationPattern { 
            ...
 }
        ...
    }

Animal.MigrationPattern stlToSanFrancisco = new Animal.MigrationPattern();

    ...
        
    Enumeration getEnumeration() {
    
        return new Enumeration() {
            int element = 0;
            boolean hasMoreElements() {
                return  element < employees.length ;
            }
            Object nextElement() {
                if ( hasMoreElements() )
                    return employees[ element++ ];
                else 
                    throw new NoSuchElementException();
            }
        };
    }
    

    new Thread ( new Runnable() {
        public void run() {  performBehavior();  }
    } ).start();

addMouseListener(new MouseAdapter() {
    public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent e) { handleClicks(e); }
});

        class Animal {
            int size;
            class Brain {
                int size;
            }
        }

        ...
        class Brain {
            Animal ourAnimal = Animal.this;
            ...

        ...
        class Brain {
            int animalSize = Animal.this.size;
            ...

    class Animal {
        class Brain {
        }
    }

    % javap 'Animal$Brain'
    class Animal$Brain extends java.lang.Object 
    {
        Animal$Brain(Animal);
    }