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

An inner class is associated with an instance of the outer class and there are two special kinds: Local class and Anonymous class. An anonymous class enables us to declare and instantiate a class at same time, hence makes the code concise. We use them when we need a local class only once as they don't have a name.

Consider the example from doc where we have a Person class:

public class Person {

    public enum Sex {
        MALE, FEMALE
    }

    String name;
    LocalDate birthday;
    Sex gender;
    String emailAddress;

    public int getAge() {
        // ...
    }

    public void printPerson() {
        // ...
    }
}

and we have a method to print members that match search criteria as:

public static void printPersons(
    List roster, CheckPerson tester) {
    for (Person p : roster) {
        if (tester.test(p)) {
            p.printPerson();
        }
    }
}

where CheckPerson is an interface like:

interface CheckPerson {
    boolean test(Person p);
}

Now we can make use of anonymous class which implements this interface to specify search criteria as:

printPersons(
    roster,
    new CheckPerson() {
        public boolean test(Person p) {
            return p.getGender() == Person.Sex.MALE
                && p.getAge() >= 18
                && p.getAge() <= 25;
        }
    }
);

Here the interface is very simple and the syntax of anonymous class seems unwieldy and unclear.

Java 8 has introduced a term Functional Interface which is an interface with only one abstract method, hence we can say CheckPerson is a functional interface. We can make use of Lambda Expression which allows us to pass the function as method argument as:

printPersons(
                roster,
                (Person p) -> p.getGender() == Person.Sex.MALE
                        && p.getAge() >= 18
                        && p.getAge() <= 25
        );

We can use a standard functional interface Predicate in place of the interface CheckPerson, which will further reduce the amount of code required.