It looks like a function to me... On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Bob Tanner wrote: > Is it just me or are inner-anonymous classes just hard to read? > > I believe this is an inner-anonymous class? if you move the first line around so that it's more commonly readable you get this - a public function called getPasswordAuthentication with a return object of class PasswordAuthentication (new instantiation of the class)- looks like a member function to me..without seeing the rest of the class , it looks a little thin to me, though... Liz public PasswordAuthentication getPasswordAuthentication() { String username, password; //prompt for user input String result = JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Enter 'username,password'"); /* parse result into tokens for use in creating a new PasswordAuthentication object*/ StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(result, ","); username = st.nextToken(); password = st.nextToken(); //return object - useless by itself, but practical if it's being used // elsewhere return new PasswordAuthentication(username, password); } If I were to use code like this it would be to push it into a vector, or to otherwise use it - ie... // ... // PasswordAuthentication pa = getPasswordAuthentication(); // ... However, I definitely wouldn't use it this way - and it might just break since it looks like username and password should be private fields - instead, considering this performs the function of a consturctor, I'd write the default constructor to prompt for the information. public class PasswordAuthentication { private String username = ""; private String password = ""; public PasswordAuthentication() { // not sure that the following will work either sicne I don't know // swing all that well, but using it to show the example. String result = JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Enter 'username,password'"); StringTokenizer st = new StringTokenizer(result, ","); username = st.nextToken(); password = st.nextToken(); } public PasswordAuthentication(String usr, String pw) { username = usr; password = pw; } } -- Imagination is intelligence having fun... e-mail: kethry at winternet.com URL: http://WWW.winternet.com/~kethry/index.html