Java Term of the Week: Subclass

Following on from the article on inheritance this week, the term today is subclass. A subclass is a class that extends another class. It's worth noting that it can be known as a derived class, extended class or child class.

Whatever you choose to call it, the subclass is a way to extend the functionally of a class that already exists. It inherits all the methods and variables from the class it extends. For example, the Employee class below is a subclass of the Person class:

public class Employee extends Person
{

}