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Message: [QUOTE="Michael Borgwardt, post: 592762"] This is known as a factory method. Paul gave an example why one might want to do this. Basically, it's more flexible than a constructor, because a constructor can only "return" an instance of the concrete class, while a factory can declare an abstract class or an interface as its return type and return an arbitrary subclass or intrface implementation. Note that in your code, SAXParser is an abstract class, so it's not possible to instantiate it with "new". No. The factory method will use "new" in some way, directly or indirectly. [/QUOTE]