[java] Class extending more than one class Java?

Most of the answers given seem to assume that all the classes we are looking to inherit from are defined by us.

But what if one of the classes is not defined by us, i.e. we cannot change what one of those classes inherits from and therefore cannot make use of the accepted answer, what happens then?

Well the answer depends on if we have at least one of the classes having been defined by us. i.e. there exists a class A among the list of classes we would like to inherit from, where A is created by us.

In addition to the already accepted answer, I propose 3 more instances of this multiple inheritance problem and possible solutions to each.

Inheritance type 1

Ok say you want a class C to extend classes, A and B, where B is a class defined somewhere else, but A is defined by us. What we can do with this is to turn A into an interface then, class C can implement A while extending B.

class A {}
class B {} // Some external class
class C {}

Turns into

interface A {}
class AImpl implements A {}
class B {} // Some external class
class C extends B implements A

Inheritance type 2

Now say you have more than two classes to inherit from, well the same idea still holds - all but one of the classes has to be defined by us. So say we want class A to inherit from the following classes, B, C, ... X where X is a class which is external to us, i.e. defined somewhere else. We apply the same idea of turning all the other classes but the last into an interface then we can have:

interface B {}
class BImpl implements B {}
interface C {}
class CImpl implements C {}
...
class X {}
class A extends X implements B, C, ...

Inheritance type 3

Finally, there is also the case where you have just a bunch of classes to inherit from, but none of them are defined by you. This is a bit trickier, but it is doable by making use of delegation. Delegation allows a class A to pretend to be some other class B but any calls on A to some public method defined in B, actually delegates that call to an object of type B and the result is returned. This makes class A what I would call a Fat class

How does this help?

Well it's simple. You create an interface which specifies the public methods within the external classes which you would like to make use of, as well as methods within the new class you are creating, then you have your new class implement that interface. That may have sounded confusing, so let me explain better.

Initially we have the following external classes B, C, D, ..., X, and we want our new class A to inherit from all those classes.

class B {
    public void foo() {}
}

class C {
    public void bar() {}
}

class D {
    public void fooFoo() {}
}

...

class X {
    public String fooBar() {}
}

Next we create an interface A which exposes the public methods that were previously in class A as well as the public methods from the above classes

interface A {
    void doSomething(); // previously defined in A
    String fooBar(); // from class X
    void fooFoo(); // from class D
    void bar(); // from class C
    void foo(); // from class B
}

Finally, we create a class AImpl which implements the interface A.

class AImpl implements A {
    // It needs instances of the other classes, so those should be
    // part of the constructor
    public AImpl(B b, C c, D d, X x) {}
    ... // define the methods within the interface
}

And there you have it! This is sort of pseudo-inheritance because an object of type A is not a strict descendant of any of the external classes we started with but rather exposes an interface which defines the same methods as in those classes.

You might ask, why we didn't just create a class that defines the methods we would like to make use of, rather than defining an interface. i.e. why didn't we just have a class A which contains the public methods from the classes we would like to inherit from? This is done in order to reduce coupling. We don't want to have classes that use A to have to depend too much on class A (because classes tend to change a lot), but rather to rely on the promise given within the interface A.