class

A concept commonly used in the context of object oriented software development. A class is an abstract concept that describes the essential nature of a group of objects with common properties and behaviours. For example the class person distills the common characteristics of real life people.

A class is therefore a collection of objects with similar: Properties (attributes) Behaviour (operations) Relationships to other objects For example, Fred, Brad, Janet and Slugger are all objects that belong to the class "person". Note that an object is a single instance of a class. Further, an object may belong to a class even if it only shares a subset of the attributes of the other objects in the class.