Learning Java

Packages and Compilation Units

A package is a name for a group of related classes and interfaces. In Chapter 3, we discussed how Java uses package names to locate classes during compilation and at runtime. In this sense, packages are somewhat like libraries; they organize and manage sets of classes. Packages provide more than just source-code-level organization though. They also create an additional level of scope for their classes and the variables and methods within them. We’ll talk about the visibility of classes later in this section. In the next section, we’ll discuss the effect that packages have on access to variables and methods among classes.

Compilation Units

The source code for a Java class is organized into compilation units. A simple compilation unit contains a single class definition and is named for that class. The definition of a class named MyClass, for instance, would appear in a file named MyClass.java. For most of us, a compilation unit is just a file with a .java extension, but in an integrated development environment, it could be an arbitrary entity. For brevity here, we’ll refer to a compilation unit simply as a file.

The division of classes into their own compilation units is important because the Java compiler assumes much of the responsibility of a make utility. The compiler relies on the names of source files to find and compile dependent classes. It’s possible (and common) to put more than one class definition into a single file, but there are some restrictions we’ll discuss shortly.

A class is declared to belong to a particular package with the package statement. The package statement must appear as the first statement in a compilation unit. There can be only one package statement, and it applies to the entire file:

package mytools.text;  
  
class TextComponent {  
     ...  
}

In this example, the class TextComponent is placed in the package mytools.text.

Package Names

Package names are constructed in a hierarchical way, using a dot-separated naming convention. Package-name components construct a unique path for the compiler and runtime systems to locate files; however, they don’t affect the contents directly in any other way. There is no such thing as a subpackage; the package namespace is really flat, not hierarchical. Packages under a particular part of a package hierarchy are related only by informal association. For example, if we create another package called mytools.text.poetry (presumably for text classes specialized in some way to work with poetry), those classes won’t be part of the mytools.text package; they won’t have the access privileges of package members. In this sense, the package-naming convention can be misleading.

Class Visibility

By default, a class is accessible only to other classes within its package. This means that the class TextComponent is available only to other classes in the mytools.text package. To be visible elsewhere, a class must be declared as public :

package mytools.text;  
  
public class TextEditor {  
     ...  
}

The class TextEditor can now be referenced anywhere. There can be only a single public class defined in a compilation unit; the file must be named for that class.

By hiding unimportant or extraneous classes, a package builds a subsystem that has a well-defined interface to the rest of the world. Public classes provide a facade for the operation of the system. The details of its inner workings can remain hidden, as shown in Figure 6.6. In this sense, packages hide classes in the way classes hide private members.

Figure 6-6. Packages and class visibility

Figure 6.6 shows part of the hypothetical mytools.text package. The classes TextArea and TextEditor are declared public, so they can be used elsewhere in an application. The class TextComponent is part of the implementation of TextArea and is not accessible from outside of the package.

Importing Classes

Classes within a package can refer to each other by their simple names. However, to locate a class in another package, we have to supply a qualifier. Continuing with the previous example, an application refers directly to our editor class by its fully qualified name of mytools.text.TextEditor. But we’d quickly grow tired of typing such long class names, so Java gives us the import statement. One or more import statements can appear at the top of a compilation unit, beneath the package statement. The import statements list the fully qualified names of classes to be used within the file.

Like a package statement, an import statement applies to the entire compilation unit. Here’s how you might use an import statement:

package somewhere.else;  
import mytools.text.TextEditor;  
  
class MyClass {  
    TextEditor editBoy;  
    ...  
}

As shown in this example, once a class is imported, it can be referenced by its simple name throughout the code.

It is also possible to import all of the classes in a package using the * wildcard notation:

import mytools.text.*;

Now we can refer to all public classes in the mytools.text package by their simple names.

Obviously, there can be a problem with importing classes that have conflicting names. If two different packages contain classes that use the same name, you just have to fall back to using fully qualified names to refer to those classes. Other than the potential for naming conflicts, there’s no penalty for importing classes. Java doesn’t carry extra baggage into the compiled class files. In other words, Java class files don’t contain other class definitions—they only reference them.

The Unnamed Package

A class that is defined in a compilation unit that doesn’t specify a package falls into the large, amorphous, unnamed package. Classes in this nameless package can refer to each other by their simple names. Their path at compile time and runtime is considered to be the current directory, so package-less classes are useful for experimentation and testing, and for brevity in examples in books about Java.