[java] How are Anonymous inner classes used in Java?

An inner class is associated with an instance of the outer class and there are two special kinds: Local class and Anonymous class. An anonymous class enables us to declare and instantiate a class at same time, hence makes the code concise. We use them when we need a local class only once as they don't have a name.

Consider the example from doc where we have a Person class:

public class Person {

    public enum Sex {
        MALE, FEMALE
    }

    String name;
    LocalDate birthday;
    Sex gender;
    String emailAddress;

    public int getAge() {
        // ...
    }

    public void printPerson() {
        // ...
    }
}

and we have a method to print members that match search criteria as:

public static void printPersons(
    List<Person> roster, CheckPerson tester) {
    for (Person p : roster) {
        if (tester.test(p)) {
            p.printPerson();
        }
    }
}

where CheckPerson is an interface like:

interface CheckPerson {
    boolean test(Person p);
}

Now we can make use of anonymous class which implements this interface to specify search criteria as:

printPersons(
    roster,
    new CheckPerson() {
        public boolean test(Person p) {
            return p.getGender() == Person.Sex.MALE
                && p.getAge() >= 18
                && p.getAge() <= 25;
        }
    }
);

Here the interface is very simple and the syntax of anonymous class seems unwieldy and unclear.

Java 8 has introduced a term Functional Interface which is an interface with only one abstract method, hence we can say CheckPerson is a functional interface. We can make use of Lambda Expression which allows us to pass the function as method argument as:

printPersons(
                roster,
                (Person p) -> p.getGender() == Person.Sex.MALE
                        && p.getAge() >= 18
                        && p.getAge() <= 25
        );

We can use a standard functional interface Predicate in place of the interface CheckPerson, which will further reduce the amount of code required.