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

You use it in situations where you need to create a class for a specific purpose inside another function, e.g., as a listener, as a runnable (to spawn a thread), etc.

The idea is that you call them from inside the code of a function so you never refer to them elsewhere, so you don't need to name them. The compiler just enumerates them.

They are essentially syntactic sugar, and should generally be moved elsewhere as they grow bigger.

I'm not sure if it is one of the advantages of Java, though if you do use them (and we all frequently use them, unfortunately), then you could argue that they are one.