Java’s Class Library

A library in Java is a collection of classes - usually providing related facilities - that you can use in your programs. The Java class library provides you with a whole range of goodies, some of which are essential for your programs to work at all, and some of which make writing your Java programs easier. To say that the standard class library covers a lot of ground would be something of an understatement, so I won’t be going into it in detail here; however, you will be looking into how to apply many of the facilities it provides throughout the book of Java.

Since the class library is a set of classes, it is stored in sets of files where each file contains a class definition. The classes are grouped together into related sets that are called packages, and each package is stored in a separate directory. A class in a package can access any of the other classes in the package. A class in another package may or may not be accessible.

The package name is based on the path to the directory in which the classes belonging to the package are stored. Classes in the package java.lang for example are stored in the directory path java\lang (or java/lang under Unix). This path is relative to a particular directory that is automatically known by the Java run-time environment that executes your code. You can also create your own packages that will contain classes of your own that you want to reuse in different contexts, and that are related in some way.

The JDK includes a growing number of standard packages - well over 100 the last time I counted. Some of the packages you will meet most frequently are:

[1] java.lang :-

These classes support the basic language features and the handling of arrays and strings. Classes in this package are always available directly in your programs by default because this package is always automatically loaded with your program.

[2] java.io :-

Classes for data input and output operations.

[3] java.util :-

This package contains utility classes of various kinds, including classes for managing data within collections or groups of data items.

[4] javax.swing :-

These classes provide easy-to-use and flexible components for building graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The components in this package are referred to as Swing components.

[5] java.awt :-

Classes in this package provide the original GUI components (JDK 1.1) as well as some basic support necessary for Swing components. java.awt.geom These classes define two-dimensional geometric shapes.

[6] java.awt.event :-

The classes in this package are used in the implementation of windowed applications to handle events in your program. Events are things like moving the mouse, pressing the left mouse button, or clicking on a menu item.

As noted previously, you can use any of the classes from the java.lang package in your programs by default. To use classes from the other packages, you typically use import statements to identify the names of the classes that you need from each package. This allows you to reference the classes by the simple class name. Without an import statement you would need to specify the fully qualified name of each class from a package each time you refer to it. As we will see in a moment, the fully qualified name for a class includes the package name as well as the basic class name. Using fully qualified class names would make your program code rather cumbersome, and certainly less readable. It would also make them a lot more tedious to type in.

You can use an import statement to import the name of a single class from a package into your program, or all the class names. The two import statements at the beginning of the code for the applet you saw earlier in this post are examples of importing a single class name. The first was:

import javax.swing.JApplet;

This statement imports the JApplet class name that is defined in the javax.swing package. Formally, the name of the JApplet class is not really JApplet - it is the fully qualified name javax.swing.JApplet. You can use the unqualified name only when you import the class or the complete package containing it into your program. You can still reference a class from a package even if you don’t import it though - you just need to use the full class name, javax.swing.JApplet. You could try this out with the applet you saw earlier if you like. Just delete the two import statements from the file and use the full class names in the program. Then recompile it. It should work the same as before. Thus, the fully qualified name for a class is the name of the package in which it is defined, followed by a period, followed by the name given to the class in its definition. You could import the names of all the classes in the javax.swing package with the statement:

import javax.swing.*;

The asterisk specifies that all the class names are to be imported. Importing just the class names that your source code uses makes compilation more efficient, but when you are using a lot of classes from a package you may find it more convenient to import all the names. This saves typing reams of import statements for one thing. We will do this with examples of Java code in the book to keep the number of lines to a minimum. However, there are risks associated with importing all the names in a package. There may be classes with names that are identical to names you have given to your own classes, which would obviously create some confusion when you compile your code.

As I indicated earlier, the standard classes do not appear as files or directories on your hard disk. They are packaged up in a single compressed file, rt.jar, that is stored in the jre/lib directory. This directory is created when you install the JDK on your computer. A .jar file is a Java archive - a compressed archive of Java classes. The standard classes that your executable program requires are loaded automatically from rt.jar, so you don’t have to be concerned with it directly at all.