Encapsulation

Today I watched a tutorial on encapsulation. This is an extension of the public private and protected tutorial. Explaining why we declare instance variables, and methods private within a class. You want to declare a method private when you are only going to use it within the class. In general try not to make instance variables public unless they are constants. One reason we due this is to reduce cross linkages, you don’t want one class getting entangled in another class. Another thing the tutorial talked about is API documents. This is just the documents of built in classes for java. For example String is a built in class, meaning you don’t have to make a String class to create a String object in java. The API document gives you information on everything about the class, interfaces, instance variables, methods, constructers, etc. You will notice that in the built in classes there aren’t many instance variables that are public, except constants. The point of encapsulation is to define things private as much as you can unless, you need to use them outside that class.