Welcome to the Treehouse Community
Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.
Looking to learn something new?
Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.
Start your free trial
Holly Fox
2,808 PointsWhat's the significance of creating a "new" object in java?
I'm very new to coding and just currently understanding the principles of Java on the android track.
The rules of initialising, variables, importing and finding ID's between the packages are starting to click into place. The part I'm still struggling to grasp is creating "new" objects. Please could someone explain why we do this?
Thank you Holly
2 Answers
Gunjeet Hattar
14,483 PointsHi Holly,
Welcome to the world of programming.
Well to put it in easy words, new allocates space for an object.
So from the concepts that you already know, for example I have a class called Hello and a some methods inside it. Now I need to define an object of Hello to be used in some other class. For that we usually write
Hello ha;
here ha can be any user defined name.
So did this create an object?
NO. This statement simply tells us that ha is of type Hello. But, by convention ha does not exists as yet.
However, when I write
Hello ha = new Hello();
now ha has physical existence within the memory, or what we call program stack. Thus, the keyword new has alloted ha some space in memory so that we can now use it.
Hope this explains :)
Luke Glazebrook
13,564 PointsHi Holly!
A great thing about Objects is that they can hold their information and set of properties which make them awesome to use in a program. Often I feel the best way to explain things like this are through examples. So, in this example I am the owner of an animal farm.
String name;
int age;
String gender;
Animal zebra = new Animal(); //Here I am creating a new Animal object called 'zebra'.
zebra.name = "Martin"; //Here I am giving the zebra object a name using the string we defined earlier on in this code.
System.out.println("The Zebra at this Zoo is called" + zebra.name);
I hope that this helps you understand objects a bit more. If you still need any more help then please feel free to ask and I will try and help you as much as I possibly can.
-Luke
Holly Fox
2,808 PointsThanks Luke, and Martin the zebra ;) both answers have really helped me to understand this. I really appreciate the help.
Luke Glazebrook
13,564 PointsMe and Martin the zebra are very glad to have been able to help you out Holly and we both wish you the best of luck with your programming!
-Luke
Holly Fox
2,808 PointsHolly Fox
2,808 PointsThank you this has really helped. And thanks for the information about program stack, just did some research and things are starting to make sense. Just need to put this theory into practice!