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Class access

In Java, the access specifiers can also be used to determine which classes within a library will be available to the users of that library. If you want a class to be available to a client programmer, you place the public keyword somewhere before the opening brace of the class body. This controls whether the client programmer can even create an object of the class.

To control the access of a class, the specifier must appear before the keyword class. Thus you can say:

public class Widget {

That is, if the name of your library is mylib any client programmer can access Widget by saying

import mylib.Widget;

import mylib.*;

However, there’s an extra pair of constraints:

There can be only one public class per compilation unit (file). The idea is that each compilation unit has a single public interface represented by that public class. It can have as many supporting “friendly” classes as you want. If you have more than one public class inside a compilation unit, the compiler will give you an error message.
The name of the public class must exactly match the name of the file containing the compilation unit, including capitalization. So for Widget, the name of the file must be Widget.java, not widget.java or WIDGET.java. Again, you’ll get a compile-time error if they don’t agree.
It is possible, though not typical, to have a compilation unit with no public class at all. In this case, you can name the file whatever you like.

What if you’ve got a class inside mylib that you’re just using to accomplish the tasks performed by Widget or some other public class in mylib? You don’t want to go to the bother of creating documentation for the client programmer, and you think that sometime later you might want to completely change things and rip out your class altogether, substituting a different one. To give you this flexibility, you need to ensure that no client programmers become dependent on your particular implementation details hidden inside mylib. To accomplish this, you just leave the public keyword off the class, in which case it becomes friendly. (That class can be used only within that package.)

Note that a class cannot be private (that would make it accessible to no one but the class), or protected.[26] So you have only two choices for class access: “friendly” or public. If you don’t want anyone else to have access to that class, you can make all the constructors private, thereby preventing anyone but you, inside a static member of the class, from creating an object of that class. [27] Here’s an example:

//: Lunch.java
// Demonstrates class access specifiers.
// Make a class effectively private
// with private constructors:

class Soup {
  private Soup() {}
  // (1) Allow creation via static method:
  public static Soup makeSoup() {
    return new Soup();
  }
  // (2) Create a static object and
  // return a reference upon request.
  // (The "Singleton" pattern):
  private static Soup ps1 = new Soup();
  public static Soup access() {
    return ps1;
  }
  public void f() {}
}

class Sandwich { // Uses Lunch
  void f() { new Lunch(); }
}

// Only one public class allowed per file:
public class Lunch {
  void test() {
    // Can't do this! Private constructor:
    //! Soup priv1 = new Soup();
    Soup priv2 = Soup.makeSoup();
    Sandwich f1 = new Sandwich();
    Soup.access().f();
  }
} ///:~

Up to now, most of the methods have been returning either void or a primitive type so the definition:

  public static Soup access() {
    return ps1;
  }

might look a little confusing at first. The word before the method name ( access) tells what the method returns. So far this has most often been void, which means it returns nothing. But you can also return a handle to an object, which is what happens here. This method returns a handle to an object of class Soup.

The class Soup shows how to prevent direct creation of a class by making all the constructors private. Remember that if you don’t explicitly create at least one constructor, the default constructor (a constructor with no arguments) will be created for you. By writing the default constructor, it won’t be created automatically. By making it private, no one can create an object of that class. But now how does anyone use this class? The above example shows two options. First, a static method is created that creates a new Soup and returns a handle to it. This could be useful if you want to do some extra operations on the Soup before returning it, or if you want to keep count of how many Soup objects to create (perhaps to restrict their population).

The second option uses what’s called a design pattern , which will be discussed later in this book. This particular pattern is called a “singleton” because it allows only a single object to ever be created. The object of class Soup is created as a static private member of Soup, so there’s one and only one, and you can’t get at it except through the public method access( ).

As previously mentioned, if you don’t put an access specifier for class access it defaults to “friendly.” This means that an object of that class can be created by any other class in the package, but not outside the package. (Remember, all the files within the same directory that don’t have explicit package declarations are implicitly part of the default package for that directory.) However, if a static member of that class is public, the client programmer can still access that static member even though they cannot create an object of that class.

[26] Actually, a Java 1.1 inner class can be private or protected, but that’s a special case. These will be introduced in Chapter 7.

[27] You can also do it by inheriting (Chapter 6) from that class.

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