Featured White Papers

• What Developers Want: The End of Application Redeploys

Sponsored Links

• Career opportunities at Harman- Careers That’ll Rock Your Socks Off.

  Learn More!

• Developer-friendly Java PDF libraries by Qoppa Software

  Live Demos

• Stop blaming your app! Diagnose Java performance issues.

  Free tool >

• UrbanCode: Go From Continuous Integration to
  Continuous Delivery

  Learn More!

Sponsored Links

Optimize with a SATA RAID Storage Solution
Range of capacities as low as $1250 per TB. Ideal if you currently rely on servers/disks/JBODs

Inner classes (4/20/99)

The JavaWorld experts answer your most pressing Java questions -- every week

By Java Q&a Experts, JavaWorld.com, 04/20/99

Is it possible to declare a class inside another class and to have the inner class access the private variable of the main class?

Certainly! Java 1.1 introduced the concept of inner classes to the Java language. Here's an example of an inner class accessing a private data member of an enclosing class:

public class OuterClass {
   private static String hiding = "You can't see me!";
   public static class InnerClass {
      public static void showMe() {
         System.out.println(hiding);
      }
   }
   public static void main (String args[]) {
      InnerClass.showMe();
   }
}

When run, this application will print out "You can't see me!"