[Biojava-l] Access to variables

[mark.schreiber at novartis.com]

Further to this I would add that sometimes get / set methods should not be 
public. This is usually the case for set methods where you don't want the 
possibility of something external to the class or package calling the set 
method and messing things up for you. For a set method to only be 
accesible internally you would make it private. If you make it protected 
you have more options. If you make it public you expose it to the world.

Basically if you think your set method is not safe for general developers 
to use under normal circumstances or if it is only relevant to other 
classes in your API you should make it protected or private.

Hope that was not too confusing. Bloch's Effective Java is probably much 
clearer/

- Mark

Mark Schreiber
Research Investigator (Bioinformatics)

Novartis Institute for Tropical Diseases (NITD)
10 Biopolis Road
#05-01 Chromos
Singapore 138670
www.nitd.novartis.com

phone +65 6722 2973
fax  +65 6722 2910





David Huen <smh1008 at cam.ac.uk>
Sent by: biojava-l-bounces at lists.open-bio.org
05/09/2006 09:12 PM

 
        To:     n.haigh at sheffield.ac.uk
        cc:     biojava-l at lists.open-bio.org, (bcc: Mark Schreiber/GP/Novartis)
        Subject:        Re: [Biojava-l] Access to variables


On May 9 2006, Nathan S. Haigh wrote:

>Apologies if this comes through more than once - I forgot to send in 
plain
>text without attachments!
>
>In case you don't know - I'm new to Java?.
>
>I'm working out an interface/class structure for part of an app I want to
>convert from Perl to Java and I have a question about the best way to
>provide access to variables to the client programmer:
>
>Is it best to have variables you want the client programmer to access 
just
>made public or is it best to provide access to them via a get/set method?
>> From my limited reading of "Thinking in Java" I would think it best to 
>> hide
>the implementation from the user and provide methods to access these
>variables e.g. setThreshold and getThreshold modify the private variable
>threshold - is that correct or am I way off the mark!?
>
Breaking object encapsulation is generally a bad thing in OO programming 
so, yes, avoid it when you can. We try to make it difficult to do so in 
BioJava anyway :-).

Regards,
David

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