Regarding packages,help please

Question

Hi,
As I have understood it for example,
What is the difference in putting the/source class files in the
package package1;
and
package my.own.package1
Its the same right,why do we have to put the extra my.own
and setting the class path accordingly
Hope that I conveyed my question correctly.
Help appreciated
Thanks
AS

Answer 1

You can use a single named package just fine.
Packages are typically used for ogranization as well
as reduced name collisions.
The normal naming convention for packages is as
follows:
domain.company.package;
So if your domain is org and you're developing a gui
project for apache then it would look like:
org.apache.gui;
Just think if everyone started using single name
packages how many more collisions there would be. For
example, if you and I were developing web components
and we both decided to use the package name web then
it would be tough to intermingle our code as the
potential for conflicts is higher. For example, if we
both had an upload object in our package that did
different things then they couldn't co-exist. See
below:
package web
//My servlet to receive uploads
class Upload extends Servlet
package web
//Your component to help POST uploads
class Upload extends URLStreamHandler
}However if we prepend our domains and company names to
the package then we could share code:
package com.ics.web
//My servlet to receive uploads
class Upload extends Servlet
package org.apache.web
//Your component to help POST uploads
class Upload extends URLStreamHandler
}Furthermore you'd most likely want some organization
to your code. you wouldn't just want one package with
all of your classes in it. It would be hard to
decipher which is which. So you'd create sub-packages
under your main package. You get something like
org.apache.web.servlets and org.apache.web.client. Why
do this? because you want to treat your client
classes differently than your servlets. It makes it
easier at build time as well when the classes need to
deploy in different places. It's just easier to say
grab everything from the servlets package and put them
in my web archive (war). Also grab everything from
client and put them in the root of my Enterprise
archive (EAR). There are other uses for this as well,
I'm sure.
CliffThanks Cliff for the comprehensive introduction for using packages.Will understand it programatically now.Any doubts will keep posting.
AS