How do you define a class and a method in Java?

The main reason to define inner classes (within a method or a class) is to deal with accessibility of members and variables of the enclosing class and method . An inner class can look up private data members and operate on them. If within a method it can deal with final local variable as well.

Class methods are methods that are called on a class rather than an instance . They are typically used as part of an object meta-model. I.e, for each class, defined an instance of the class object in the meta-model is created.

Class methods are methods that are called on the class itself, not on a specific object instance . The static modifier ensures implementation is the same across all class instances. Many standard built-in classes in Java (for example, Math) come with static methods (for example, Math.