For this week’s blog post, I have found an article about encapsulation. Encapsulation is more than defining accessor and mutator methods. It also follows two main objectives hiding complexity and hiding the sources of change. To understand more about encapsulation, we will first need to understand the two concepts of modularity and abstraction. In the article, Edwin Dalorzo, the author of the article, uses the example of a car to understand abstraction. He says on this, “A car is complex in its internal working. They have several subsystems, like the transmission system, the break system, the fuel system, etc. However, we have simplified its abstraction, … we know that all cars have a steering wheel through which we control direction, they have a pedal that when we press it we accelerate the car and control speed, … These features constitute the public interface of the car abstraction” (Edwin Dalorzo). This is a great example because we can use abstraction to simplify unnecessary parts that the users would not need to understand. This concept is similar to modularity. In his book Code Complete, Steve McConnell said on complexity “ the interface should reveal as little possible about its inner workings”. So now that we understand the two concepts, the idea of encapsulation starts to unravel.
One of the things that we want to always encapsulate in Java is the state of a class. This should only be accessed through its public interface. Edwin says on encapsulation in Java, “In a object-oriented programming language like Java, we achieve encapsulation by hiding details using the accessibility modifiers … With these levels of accessibility we control the level of encapsulation, the less restrictive the level, the more expensive change is when it happens and the more coupled the class is with other dependent classes (i.e. user classes, subclasses, etc.).” (Edwin Dalorzo). It is crucial that we keep this idea in mind while we design encapsulation for these public interfaces so that we can foster evolution of our APIs.
As talked about in the article, it is often wondered why we need to use accessor and mutator methods in Java, aka getters and setters. With encapsulation in mind, it is not there to hide the data itself but the implementation details on how the data is being manipulated. So once again we would need a public interface to gain access to this data. However, by exposing this data we risk losing encapsulation. So this is why we would need to encapsulate this information.
https://dzone.com/articles/why-encapsulation-matters
From the blog CS@worcester – Michale Friedrich by mikefriedrich1 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.