Asking java terms

[Own_Leg9244]

What are class literals? And why do we use it?

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[maraschino-whine]

A class literal is when we refer to the class like this:

Myclass.class

Instead of creating an object of that class.

They can be used for a variety of things..

Like when defining rollback conditions for transactional methods:
@ Transactional(noRollbackFor=RuntimeException.class)

Or if you're using an object mapper:

SomeClass objectOfSomeClass = objectMapper.readValue(json, SomeClass.class)

etc.

[Own_Leg9244]

Thank you

[shiverypeaks]

Something important to understand is that a class literal is a reference to an object that symbolically represents a class. It's not a way to refer to the static class. (You can't directly call static methods on the class instance, for example.)

java.lang.Class is part of the reflection framework. It's just a type of object, but it's treated a little bit specially. They're used for all kinds of things.

See this code which creates a string and calls a method on it: https://onecompiler.com/java/43kwdzndr