Confusion in Calender Class

[Malhar Me]

Hello everyone,

I ahve one question. Calender class in java is abstract class. But if you want to use it then you are creating its instance using
Calendar rightNow = Calendar.getInstance();

Here is the few lines which are in help on Suns site:

A Calendar object can produce all the time field values needed to implement the date-time formatting for a particular language and calendar style (for example, Japanese-Gregorian, Japanese-Traditional). Calendar defines the range of values returned by certain fields, as well as their meaning. For example, the first month of the year has value MONTH == JANUARY for all calendars. Other values are defined by the concrete subclass, such as ERA and YEAR. See individual field documentation and subclass documentation for details.


The method details:

getInstance

public static Calendar getInstance()

Gets a calendar using the default time zone and locale. The Calendar returned is based on the current time in the default time zone with the default locale.

Returns:
a Calendar.

Here is my question:
(1) If the Calender class is abstract how it clould be possible to create a calender object???

Can anybody give me the exact explanation about this? How to create a object of the abstract class. or how the calender object create here???

Malhar

[Ankit Garg]

Calendar class has 8 or so abstract methods. You can create an instance of an abstract class by either sub-classing it normally or using anonymous inner class. And as far as Calendar goes, it returns an instance of one of the concrete sub-class GregorianCalendar. I don't know if there is any exception to this...

[aabir sanyal]

Ankit Garg wrote:Calendar class has 8 or so abstract methods. You can create an instance of an abstract class by either sub-classing it normally or using anonymous inner class. And as far as Calendar goes, it returns an instance of one of the concrete sub-class GregorianCalendar. I don't know if there is any exception to this...

Not satisfied with this explanation. Want a better one. Nice question by the way.

[Henry Wong]

aabir sanyal wrote:Not satisfied with this explanation. Want a better one. Nice question by the way.

It would help if you explain what you are not satisfied with.... We can't elaborate, if we don't know what you don't understand.

Henry

[Henry Wong]

Here is my question:
(1) If the Calender class is abstract how it clould be possible to create a calender object???

Keep in mind that subclasses of a superclass IS-A superclass type too. So, returning an instance of a subclass (concrete) of the calendar class IS returning a calendar object.

Henry

[Michael Angstadt]

The Calendar.getInstance() method basically looks like this:

public static Calendar getInstance(){
  return new GregorianCalendar();
}

GregorianCalendar is a non-abstract subclass of Calendar.

[aabir sanyal]

Michael Angstadt wrote:The Calendar.getInstance() method basically looks like this:

public static Calendar getInstance(){
  return new GregorianCalendar();
}

GregorianCalendar is a non-abstract subclass of Calendar.

Perfect, thanks.

[Malhar Me]

Thanks for the answer.