Java Interview Questions Part 13

1. What modifiers are allowed for methods in an Interface?
Only public and abstract modifiers are allowed for methods in interfaces.

2. What are some alternatives to inheritance?
Delegation is an alternative to inheritance. Delegation means that you include an instance of another class as an instance variable, and forward messages to the instance. It is often safer than inheritance because it forces you to think about each message you forward, because the instance is of a known class, rather than a new class, and because it doesn't force you to accept all the methods of the super class: you can provide only the methods that really make sense. On the other hand, it makes you write more code, and it is harder to re-use (because it is not a subclass).

3. What does it mean that a method or field is "static"?
Static variables and methods are instantiated only once per class. In other words they are class variables, not instance variables. If you change the value of a static variable in a particular object, the value of that variable changes for all instances of that class. Static methods can be referenced with the name of the class rather than the name of a particular object of the class (though that works too). That's how library methods like System.out.println() work out is a static field in the java.lang.System class.

4. What is the difference between preemptive scheduling and time slicing?
Under preemptive scheduling, the highest priority task executes until it enters the waiting or dead states or a higher priority task comes into existence. Under time slicing, a task executes for a predefined slice of time and then reenters the pool of ready tasks. The scheduler then determines which task should execute next, based on priority and other factors.

5. What is the catch or declare rule for method declarations?
If a checked exception may be thrown within the body of a method, the method must either catch the exception or declare it in its throws clause.

6. Is Empty .java file a valid source file?
Yes, an empty .java file is a perfectly valid source file.

7. Can a .java file contain more than one java classes?
Yes, a .java file contain more than one java classes, provided at the most one of them is a public class.

Java Interview Questions Part 7

1. What is the common usage of serialization?
Whenever an object is to be sent over the network, objects need to be serialized. Moreover if the state of an object is to be saved, objects need to be serilazed.

2. What is Externalizable interface?
Externalizable is an interface which contains two methods readExternal and writeExternal. These methods give you a control over the serialization mechanism. Thus if your class implements this interface, you can customize the serialization process by implementing these methods.

3. When you serialize an object, what happens to the object references included in the object?
The serialization mechanism generates an object graph for serialization. Thus it determines whether the included object references are serializable or not. This is a recursive process. Thus when an object is serialized, all the included objects are also serialized alongwith the original obect.

4. What one should take care of while serializing the object?
One should make sure that all the included objects are also serializable. If any of the objects is not serializable then it throws a NotSerializableException.

5. What happens to the static fields of a class during serialization?
There are three exceptions in which serialization doesnot necessarily read and write to the stream. 
These are

1. Serialization ignores static fields, because they are not part of ay particular state state.
2. Base class fields are only hendled if the base class itself is serializable.
3. Transient fields.

6. Does Java provide any construct to find out the size of an object?
No there is not sizeof operator in Java. So there is not direct way to determine the size of an object directly in Java.

7. Give a simplest way to find out the time a method takes for execution without using any profiling tool?
Read the system time just before the method is invoked and immediately after method returns. Take the time difference, which will give you the time taken by a method for execution.
To put it in code...
long start = System.currentTimeMillis ();
method ();
long end = System.currentTimeMillis ();
System.out.println ("Time taken for execution is " + (end - start));
Remember that if the time taken for execution is too small, it might show that it is taking zero milliseconds for execution. Try it on a method which is big enough, in the sense the one which is doing considerable amout of processing.