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copied!<p>Static methods are treated as global by the JVM, there are not bound to an object instance at all.</p> <p>It could conceptually be possible if you could call static methods from class objects (like in languages like Smalltalk) but it's not the case in Java. </p> <p><strong>EDIT</strong></p> <p>You can <em>overload</em> static method, that's ok. But you can not <em>override</em> a static method, because class are no first-class object. You can use reflection to get the class of an object at run-time, but the object that you get does not parallel the class hierarchy. </p> <pre><code>class MyClass { ... } class MySubClass extends MyClass { ... } MyClass obj1 = new MyClass(); MySubClass obj2 = new MySubClass(); ob2 instanceof MyClass --> true Class clazz1 = obj1.getClass(); Class clazz2 = obj2.getClass(); clazz2 instanceof clazz1 --> false </code></pre> <p>You can reflect over the classes, but it stops there. You don't invoke a static method by using <code>clazz1.staticMethod()</code>, but using <code>MyClass.staticMethod()</code>. A static method is not bound to an object and there is hence no notion of <code>this</code> nor <code>super</code> in a static method. A static method is a global function; as a consequence there is also no notion of polymorphism and, therefore, method overriding makes no sense. </p> <p>But this could be possible if <code>MyClass</code> was an object at run-time on which you invoke a method, as in Smalltalk (or maybe JRuby as one comment suggest, but I know nothing of JRuby).</p> <p>Oh yeah... one more thing. You can invoke a static method through an object <code>obj1.staticMethod()</code> but that really syntactic sugar for <code>MyClass.staticMethod()</code> and should be avoided. It usually raises a warning in modern IDE. I don't know why they ever allowed this shortcut.</p>

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