What is the following syntax for?

Question

I saw this on the Sun tutorial for swing components and was a little baffled. I'm a "professional core java programmer" yet I did not recognized the syntax. Here it is...
JLabel myLabel = new JLabel("A Label"){
public void Amethod(){
// method body
public void AnotherMethod(){
// method body 2
What is the purpose of the curly bracketed code after a object declaration?
I even tried this in eclipse and it worked....
Object _obj = new Object(){}; // compiles
I know you can put {} anywhere but what does it do when you have method implementation in them?

Answer 1

It creates an anonymous inner class which extends something else;
in your example the JLabel class is extended. At the same time an
object of that extended class is created. The syntax is funny indeed
but very handy for all sorts of Listeners used in the Swing framework.
Note that there are other situations where such an anonymous inner
class can come in handy. Try this for example (see below) and change
the text in the label:JLabel label= new JLabel("initial text") {
   public void setText(String text) { // override the setText method
      super.setText(text);
      System.out.println("Changed label text: "+text);
label.setText("new text");kind regards,
Jos