How are Anonymous inner classes used in Java?

Question

What is the use of anonymous classes in Java? Can we say that usage of anonymous class is one of the advantages of Java?

Answer 1

Anonymous inner classes are effectively closures, so they can be used to emulate lambda expressions or "delegates". For example, take this interface:

public interface F {
   B f(A a);
}

You can use this anonymously to create a first-class function in Java. Let's say you have the following method that returns the first number larger than i in the given list, or i if no number is larger:

public static int larger(final List ns, final int i) {
  for (Integer n : ns)
     if (n > i)
        return n;
  return i;
}

And then you have another method that returns the first number smaller than i in the given list, or i if no number is smaller:

public static int smaller(final List ns, final int i) {
   for (Integer n : ns)
      if (n < i)
         return n;
   return i;
}

These methods are almost identical. Using the first-class function type F, we can rewrite these into one method as follows:

public static  T firstMatch(final List ts, final F f, T z) {
   for (T t : ts)
      if (f.f(t))
         return t;
   return z;
}

You can use an anonymous class to use the firstMatch method:

F greaterThanTen = new F {
   Boolean f(final Integer n) {
      return n > 10;
   }
};
int moreThanMyFingersCanCount = firstMatch(xs, greaterThanTen, x);

This is a really contrived example, but its easy to see that being able to pass functions around as if they were values is a pretty useful feature. See "Can Your Programming Language Do This" by Joel himself.

A nice library for programming Java in this style: Functional Java.