What Does Instantiation Mean: A Real World Example

Before we dive into the code, let’s analyze a real world example of instantiation. (And a quick spoiler alert. If you understand what it takes to build a house, you already understand instantiation.)

The Blueprint

Let’s imagine that you’re building a house. One of the first tasks you’d most likely do is build a blueprint for the home. This blueprint would contain attributes and features of the house, such as:

• The dimensions for each room
• How the plumbing will flow
• And essentially every attribute of the house

Now let me ask a dumb question. Is the blueprint of the house the actual house? No, it simply lists out the attributes and design for how the home will be created

The Actual House

So after the blueprint is completed, the actual home can be built. Dare I say that the home can be “instantiated”?

Connecting the Dots

From an object oriented programming perspective, a class is the blueprint for an object. A class simply describes what an object will look like and how it will behave.

Therefore instantiation is the process of taking a class definition and creating an object that you can use in a program. Still a little fuzzy? That’s fine, let’s look at a code example.

What Does Instantiation Mean: A Code Example

I’m going to build this example in Ruby, however instantiation has the same behavior in essentially every object oriented language.

The Class: aka the code blueprint

For this example we’re going to have an Invoice class. Inside the class definition we have attributes, such as a customer and total. Along with some behavior, such as printing out an invoice summary.

Creating an Object: using instantiation

Now, we create a new instance of Invoice and store it in a variable, as shown here. I have used instantiation to:

• Take a class.
• Build an object based on the class definition.

And with this process in place I can use the object to perform tasks, such as printing out the summary.

Summary

So, at it’s core, instantiation is the process of taking a class, and creating an object from it that you can actually use in your program.

I hope that this has been a helpful guide for answering the question of how instantiation works, and that you now feel confident on using it in your own programs.

For a deeper dive into object oriented programming techniques, I’ve included a link to some tutorials on OOP in Ruby where you can extend your knowledge and build some real world projects. I’ve also included a link to the code I reviewed in this guide.