Chapter 8

Inheritance
Inheritance
 Review of class relationships

 Uses – One class uses the services

of another class, either by making
objects of that class or by using
static functions of the class.
 Has A – One class’s attributes
includes one or more object of
another class.

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Inheritance
 Is A – Describes that one class is a
more specific form of another class.

 For example, Triangle is a Shape,

Prius is a HybridCar.

 We cannot say Shape is a Triangle,

nor can we say Triangle is a
Rectangle.

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Inheritance
 Inheritance is a fundamental object-
oriented design technique used to create
and organize reusable classes
 Reference is Chapter 8 in the book.

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Inheritance
 Inheritance allows a software developer to derive a
new class from an existing one
 The existing class is called the parent class, or
superclass, or base class
 The derived class is called the child class or subclass
 As the name implies, the child inherits
characteristics of the parent
 That is, the child class inherits the methods and
data defined by the parent class

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 Inheritance
 Inheritance relationships are shown in a UML
class diagram using a solid arrow with an unfilled
triangular arrowhead pointing to the parent class

Car

Prius

 Proper inheritance creates an is-a

relationship, meaning the child is a more
specific version of the parent
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Inheritance
 A programmer can tailor a derived class as
needed by adding new variables or
methods, or by modifying the inherited
ones
 Software reuse is a fundamental benefit of
inheritance
 By using existing software components to
create new ones, we capitalize on all the
effort that went into the design,
implementation, and testing of the existing
software

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 Deriving Subclasses
 In Java, we use the reserved word extends
to establish an inheritance relationship

class Prius extends Car

{
// class contents
}

 See Words.java (page 440)

 See Book.java (page 441)
 See Dictionary.java (page 442)

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The protected Modifier
 Visibility modifiers affect the way that class
members can be used in a child class
 Variables and methods declared with private
visibility cannot be referenced by name in a
child class
 They can be referenced in the child class if
they are declared with public visibility -- but
public variables violate the principle of
encapsulation
 There is a third visibility modifier that helps in
inheritance situations: protected

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 The protected Modifier
 The protected modifier allows a child class to
reference a variable or method directly in the
child class
 It provides more encapsulation than public
visibility, but is not as tightly encapsulated as
private visibility
 A protected variable is visible to any class in the
same package as the parent class
 The details of all Java modifiers are discussed in
Appendix E
 Protected variables and methods can be shown
with a # symbol preceding them in UML diagrams
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Class Diagram for Words

Book
# pages : int

+ pageMessage() : void

Words Dictionary
- definitions : int
+ main (args : String[]) : void
+ definitionMessage() : void

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The super Reference
 Constructors are not inherited, even though
they have public visibility
 Yet we often want to use the parent's
constructor to set up the "parent's part" of the
object
 The super reference can be used to refer to the
parent class, and often is used to invoke the
parent's constructor
 See Words2.java (page 445)
 See Book2.java (page 446)
 See Dictionary2.java (page 447)

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The super Reference
 A child’s constructor is responsible
for calling the parent’s constructor
 The first line of a child’s constructor
should use the super reference to
call the parent’s constructor
 The super reference can also be
used to reference other variables
and methods defined in the parent’s
class
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Multiple Inheritance
 Java supports single inheritance, meaning that a
derived class can have only one parent class
 Multiple inheritance allows a class to be derived
from two or more classes, inheriting the
members of all parents
 Collisions, such as the same variable name in
two parents, have to be resolved
 Java does not support multiple inheritance
 In most cases, the use of interfaces gives us
aspects of multiple inheritance without the
overhead

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Class Hierarchies
 A child class of one parent can be
the parent of another child, forming
a class hierarchy
Business

RetailBusiness ServiceBusiness

KMart Macys Kinkos

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Class Hierarchies
 Two children of the same parent are called
siblings
 Common features should be put as high in
the hierarchy as is reasonable
 An inherited member is passed continually
down the line
 Therefore, a child class inherits from all its
ancestor classes
 There is no single class hierarchy that is
appropriate for all situations

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The Object Class
 A class called Object is defined in the
java.lang package of the Java standard
class library
 All classes are derived from the Object
class
 If a class is not explicitly defined to be the
child of an existing class, it is assumed to
be the child of the Object class
 Therefore, the Object class is the ultimate
root of all class hierarchies

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The Object Class
 The Object class contains a few useful
methods, which are inherited by all classes
 For example, the toString method is defined
in the Object class
 Every time we define the toString method,
we are actually overriding an inherited
definition
 The toString method in the Object class is
defined to return a string that contains the
name of the object’s class along with some
other information

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The Object Class
 The equals method of the Object class
returns true if two references are aliases
 We can override equals in any class to
define equality in some more appropriate
way
 As we've seen, the String class defines the
equals method to return true if two String
objects contain the same characters
 The designers of the String class have
overridden the equals method inherited from
Object in favor of a more useful version

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