The Java Language: Object creation

Objects in Java are allocated with the new operator:

 Object o = new Object();  

The argument to new is the constructor for the class. The constructor is a method that always has the same name as the class. The constructor specifies any required parameters to create an instance of the object. The value of the new expression is a reference of the type of the created object. Objects always have one or more constructors, though they may not always be accessible to you. We will look at object creation in detail. For now, just note that object creation is a type of expression and that the result is an object reference. A minor oddity is that the binding of new is “tighter” than that of the dot (.) selector. So you can create a new object and invoke a method in it without assigning the object to a reference type variable if you have some reason to:

 int hours = new Date().getHours();  

The Date class is a utility class that represents the current time. Here we create a new instance of Date with the new operator and call its getHours() method to retrieve the current hour as an integer value. The Date object reference lives long enough to service the method call and is then cut loose and garbage-collected at some point in the future (we will discuss in detail about garbage collection). Calling methods in object references in this way is, again, a matter of style. It would certainly be clearer to allocate an intermediate variable of type Date to hold the new object and then call its getHours() method. However, combining operations like this is common.