Class

An abstraction of a concept or group of things that describes the state and behaviour that all examples share. Similar to a data type

Object Oriented Development

The term is closely tied to its sense in object-oriented programming, there a class is a programming language construct that is used as a blueprint to create objects. This blueprint describes the state and behaviour that the created objects all share. An object created by a class is an instance of the class, and the class that created that instance can be considered as the type of that object, e.g. a type of an object created by a "Fruit" class would be "Fruit".

A class encapsulates state through data placeholders called attributes (or member variables or instance variables), it encapsulates behaviour through code called methods.

Links to this page

The following pages link to here: Attribute, Classification, Data Type, Identifier, Inference, Instance, Method, UML Class Diagram, UML Composite Structure Diagram, UML Object Diagram, UML Structure Diagrams, Unified Modeling Language, Uses for IA