WebReference.com - Part 3 of chapter 5 from Beginning Java 2 SDK 1.4 Edition, Wrox Press Ltd (1/5)

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Beginning Java 2 SDK 1.4 Edition

Using Objects

[The following is a continuation of our series of excerpts from chapter 5 of the Wrox Press title, Beginning Java 2 SDK 1.4 Edition. Source code for the examples discussed can be downloaded at the Wrox Web site (free e-mail registration required).]

Let's create an example to do some simple 2D geometry. This will give us an opportunity to use more than one class. We will define two classes, a class of point objects and a class of line objects--we then use these to find the point at which the lines intersect. We will call the example TryGeometry, so this will be the name of the directory or folder in which you should save the program files. Quite a few lines of code are involved so we will put it together piecemeal, and try to understand how each piece works as we go.

Try It Out--The Point Class

We first define a basic class for point objects:

class Point {
  // Coordinates of the point
  double x;
  double y;
  // Create a point from coordinates
  Point(double xVal, double yVal) {
    x = xVal;
    y = yVal;
  }
  // Create a point from another Point object
  Point(final Point oldPoint) {
    x = oldPoint.x;    // Copy x coordinate
    y = oldPoint.y;    // Copy y coordinate
  }
  // Move a point
  void move(double xDelta, double yDelta) {
    // Parameter values are increments to the current coordinates
    x += xDelta;
    y += yDelta;
  }
  // Calculate the distance to another point
  double distance(final Point aPoint) {
    return Math.sqrt( 
       (x--aPoint.x)*(x--aPoint.x) + (y--aPoint.y)*(y--aPoint.y) );
  }
  // Convert a point to a string 
  public String toString() {
    return Double.toString(x) + ", " + y;    // As "x, y"
  }
}

You should save this as Point.java in the directory TryGeometry.

How It Works

This is a simple class that has just two instance variables, x and y, which are the coordinates of the Point object. At the moment we have two constructors. One will create a point from a coordinate pair passed as arguments, and the other will create a new Point object from an existing one.

There are three methods included in the class. First we have the move() method that moves a Point to another position by adding an increment to each of the coordinates. We also have the distance() method that calculates the distance from the current Point object to the Point object passed as an argument. This uses the Pythagorean theorem to compute the distance as shown below.

Finally we have a method toString() that returns a string representation of the coordinates of the current point. If a class defines the toString() method, an object of that class can be used as an operand of the string concatenation operator +, so you can implement this in any of your classes to allow objects to be used in this way. The compiler will automatically insert a call to toString() when necessary. For example, suppose thePoint is an object of type Point, and we write the statement:

System.out.println("The point is at " + thePoint);

The toString() method will be automatically invoked to convert thePoint to a String, and the result will be appended to the String literal. We have specified the toString() method as public, as this is essential here for the class to compile. We will defer explanations as to why this is so until later in this chapter.

Note how we use the static toString() method defined in the class Double to convert the x value to a String. The compiler will insert a call to the same method automatically for the y value as the left operand of the + operation is a String object. Note that we could equally well have used the valueOf() method in the String class. In this case the statement would be written like this:

return String.valueOf(x) + ", " + y;    // As "x, y"

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Created: July 16, 2002
Revised: July 16, 2002

URL: https://webreference.com/programming/java/beginning/chap5/3/