Question about a data structure being accessed by two classes

I am writing a program which will be executing various steps and will have to track the status of each step through a Hash Map structure. The status will also be stored in a database as well.

Initially for the program I will have to initialize the HashMap in one class reading data from the database. However, another class will have to actually access this same structure to check status and write status.

How can I have the same data structure available to both classes?

I feel kinda stupid asking this because it's probably an easy question.

[573 byte] By [smiles78a] at [2007-10-2 6:36:08]