Methods and variables

[sjvon]

Being new at java, I have this question. Methods and variables that are associated with a class rather than with instances are declared private. Is this correct?

[davidkiwi]

I may be wrong but I believe that methods and variables that are associated with a class are called static, rather than private. You can declare either static or non-static members private if you need to restrict them from being accessed by anything outside of the class they were declared in.

[Pankaj]

First about static part:

Any variable declared static will have same value throughout all the instances of that class e.g

public class family{
String first_name;
static String family_name="Mathur";
int age;
String gender;
}

if we create instances of this class say :
family father-new family();
family son-new family();

then father.first_name & son.first_name can have different values but both the instances of family class will have common value for variable "family_name" or in other words if you change the value of family_name to say "Wilkes" then it will change for all its instances.

Second part is :
Protected, private & public are the acess control levels (deault is public) and have following implications:

Private: the method/variable cannot be seen or used by any other class unless called through an internal function of same class.

Protected: the method can only be called from subclasses or classes within same package.

Public: allows any class to acess and manipulate value of this variable.

Bye

[Camel]

I think your description of static is good, but missing one important point.

If you declare a member variable or method static, you can access those items without having to create an object. So, if you make a really cool class for printing your name 10 times to the screen, such as:

public class ReallyCoolNameClass
{
    static void printName(String name)   
    {
        for(int i = 0; i <=10; i++)
            System.out.println(name);
    }
}

You can use this in your code like this:

ReallyCoolNameClass.printName("Doug");

Instead of having to do this:

ReallyCoolNameClass name = new ReallyCoolNameClass();
name.printName("Doug");

This is probably a dumb and bad example, but hopefully it gets the point across.