static methods

[francis varkey]

Hi,
What is the consequence if all methods are static ?

thanks

[Maneesh Godbole]

Do static methods belong to a class or an instance?
Can static methods access non static variables?

[shiva prasad.]

Maneesh Godbole wrote:Do static methods belong to a class or an instance?
Can static methods access non static variables?

Static methods are class methods.
And static methods cannot access non static variables,
because by the time the non static variables are allocated memory the static methods get executed.

[shiva prasad.]

francis varkey wrote:Hi,
What is the consequence if all methods are static ?

thanks

If all the methods are declared as static then you are not required to create any object to that class ,
and you can directly access them using class name.

[Ashutosh Limaye]

shiva prasad. wrote:

francis varkey wrote:Hi,
What is the consequence if all methods are static ?

thanks

If all the methods are declared as static then you are not required to create any object to that class ,
and you can directly access them using class name.

... and that is one way you would help JVM manage memory from your side. If the abstraction is done only for services and not for data then such a class may not have any attributes in which case if you keep non-static methods in the class you would have to create an instance to call them, an empty object occupies atleast 4 bytes on heap because it has that "super" reference. Now why create an object if you don't need to store any data regarding that object? hence make all methods static so you can call them using class name.
Eg. Calculator class may not have any attributes if all we are concerned about are its methods; make all the methods static and you would call them as
Calculator.add()
Calculator.sub() ...

Library of Java has many such classes... good example is java.lang.System class where all the methods are static.

[Campbell Ritchie]

The Math class might be easier to understand. You pass an argument to its methods, it calculates a result, returns it, and never keeps a record of the old calculation.