Resources and toExternalForm();

I'm not sure that is 100% right, but let me try to explain this how I see it:

1. getClass() returns "blueprint" of the class you are into, so for example, if your code is inside Main class, it will return "blueprint" of Main and NOT "...class name of getResource...":

public class Main () {
    public void start() {
         getClass(); 
         // equivalent to
        this.getClass(); 
        // return "blueprint" of "Main" class
    }
}

For more on getClass() read here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/32919106/how-does-getclass-in-java-work

1. getResource(String name) is used to load resources starting from this Class location. I think better name for this method would be getREsourceUrlFromClassLocation. So program is looking for resource file, starting from specified Class location, and returns java.net.URL class.

2. toExternalForm() returns String representation of java.net.URL object:

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/net/URL.html#toExternalForm()

So overall why it is needed and why we do that...

Our goal is to load resource file into Font class.

In order to achieve that we need to provide correct path for resource file using which this Font can be loaded (in this case tff file)

Now we don't have web application, so we have to play with relative paths of where our classes situated.

That's why we say

• get class where we run method
• get URL of resource relatively (from the class that was get)
• convert URL to string in order to pass argument to Font.load