WHAT IS CLASS

[shane254]

I download a program from a site and the files have the .class extension what is this and how do I install the program and if I do need another program to install this program what is the name of the program I know It sounds confusing butI have about 7 programs like this help please!

[Mcubed]

Well, I'll take the first attempt, and the others will surely correct my miserable attempt to explain this.

A class is a portion of a program, which does something: i.e. stores data, calculates something. The beauty of the class is that it can be called upon more than once and have more than one instance of itself open at once. The C languages handle this very well, VB does it, but not as well. (They say VB7 will, though) There are books written on this and, to be honest, they all seem confusing at first.

They usually begin by explaining how accountant and salesman are members of the class "employees". Then in a program that does something with "employees" you could have a section that deals just with salesman which gets duplicated tttto do the same thing for accountants, thereby you don't have to write all the code a second time to accomplish the task.

Now, that's a very generic explanation and doesn't include any real world examples. Sorry about that short coming, but I really am not the best fellow in the world to provide examples just yet. I'm sure the others can and will.

Debra Kurata seems to be the "Queen of Class Structure" for Visual Basic. You might want to look around in one of the editions of "Doing Objects in VBx." That might help.

In terms of what you downloaded, you have modules that you can import into your own programs.

I hope this helps.

MMM

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Patience is the price you pay when you can't pay the price.

[This message has been edited by Mcubed (edited 06-27-2000).]

[UncaDanno]

Most likely it's a Java class. When a Java app is built, the build process creates files with the .class extension.

The download should have had an installer included. Were the files compressed? If so, uncompress them (sounds like you already have) and look for a readme or other .txt files that may have install instructions.

Other than that, look at where you downloaded from.

[This message has been edited by UncaDanno (edited 06-27-2000).]