What is the use of java.lang.Class in Java? Example

java.lang.Class is one of the most important classes in java but mostly overlooked by Java developers. It is very useful in the sense that it provides several utility methods like getClass(), forName() which is used to find and load a class, you might have used to load Oracle or MySQL drivers. It also provides methods like Class.newInstance() which is the backbone of reflection and allows you to create an instance of a class without using a new() operator.  The class has no public constructor and its instance is created by JVM when a class is loaded.
The object of class Class is also used to represent classes, enum, interfaces, and annotation in a running Java application. The primitive types like byte, short, char, int, float, double and boolean are also represented by Class instances.

You can get the corresponding Class instance by using class literals like int.class, float.class or boolean.class. It is also used to represent an instance of the array in Java. Every array with the same type and same dimension shares the same instance of class Class.

Another use of java.lang.Class is while implementing equals() method to check whether two objects are of the same type or not.

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java.lang.Class class in Java

Every time JVM creates an object, it also creates a java.lang.Class object that describes the type of the object. All instances of the same class share the same Class object and you can obtain the Class object by calling the getClass() method of the object. By the way, this method is inherited from java.lang.Object class.

Suppose you create two instances of a class called Person like

Person A = new Person();
Person B = new Person();

if(A.getClass() == B.getClass()){
    System.out.println("A and B are instances of same class");
}else{
    System.out.println("A and B are instances of different class");
}

In this case, it will print "A and B are instances of the same class" because they are both instances of class Person.

We need forName() and newInstance() because many times it happens that we don’t know the name of the class to instantiate while writing code, we may get it from config files, database, network or from any upstream Java or C++ application.

This is what we called the reflective way of creating an object which is one of the most powerful features of Java and which makes way for many frameworks like Spring, Struts which use Java reflection.

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