Classes are essentially blueprints, or templates, for creating your own data type in your programs. For example, if you wanted to write programs about cars, it would be very difficult to do so using the primitive data types of String, int, bool, etc.

Using classes, we can create our own data types or models by defining a class, and its attributes. These attributes are of primitive data types, but the resulting class allows us to write more complex code in a simpler manner.

When we need to create a specific instance of a class (i.e. we want to use the blueprint to actually create a car), we ‘instantiate’ it with the attributes we want, and the result is called an Object.

An object is simply a specific instance of a class – the class would be ‘Car’, and the object would be something like a Tesla Model S. Another object you might create would be a Lamborghini Aventador. You can create as many objects as you want using the same class!

Classes can be created and used like this. Notice how the type of the object that is instantiated is declared, and how the object is instantiated.

class Car {
  String name;
  int price;
  bool isMadeByElonMusk;
}

void main() {
  // type 'Car'
  Car tesla = Car(); // class is instantiated with parentheses, ()
  // populating each of the attributes we defined in the above class
  tesla.name = 'Model S';
  tesla.price = 50000;
  tesla.isMadeByElonMusk = true;
}

Now, it would be very tedious and inefficient to manually set all the attributes of an object after we’ve created one. Doing tesla.name, tesla.price, …, isn’t good enough for us.

That’s where constructors come in. Constructors allow us to define a function in our class that will deal with setting all the attributes for us. Then, to instantiate a class, all we have to do is pass in the parameters. See the example below.

Another important concept relating to classes is methods.

Methods are functions defined in our class, that deal with data and perform special operations relating to our class. For example, we might want to check whether or not our car is expensive. We can do so by defining an ‘isExpensive()’ method inside our class.

Note that methods defined within a certain class have access to the attributes associated with the object it was called upon. If the ‘isExpensive()’ method is called upon our tesla object, it has access to the tesla.price value.

// define a class named car
class Car {
  // define a constructor that takes in a String name, int price and bool isMadeByElonMusk
  Car(String name, int price, bool isMadeByElonMusk) {
    // set all the object's attributes equal to the inputs passed in
    this.name = name;
    this.price = price;
    this.isMadeByElonMusk = isMadeByElonMusk;
  }
  // defining the attributes of the class
  String name;
  int price;
  bool isMadeByElonMusk;
  
  // defining the method 'isExpensive' that returns type bool
  bool isExpensive() {
    // 'this.price' refers specifically to the price value of the object it was called upon
    if (this.price > 30000) {
      return true;
    } else {
      return false;
    }
  }
}

void main() {
  // instantiate the class by using its constructor, passing in the expected parameters
  // we defined already
  Car tesla = Car('Model S', 50000, true);
  // returns true by using the Car class's method, isExpensive, because tesla.price = 50,000
  bool isCarExpensive = tesla.isExpensive();
}