Introduction
Encapsulation is one of the four fundamental
OOP concepts. The other three are inheritance, polymorphism, and abstraction.
Encapsulation is the technique of making the fields in a class private and
providing access to the fields via public methods. If a field is declared
private it cannot be accessed by anyone outside the class there by hiding the
fields within the class. For this reason encapsulation is also referred to as
data hiding. Encapsulation refers to the bundling of data with the methods that
operate on that data. Often that definition is misconstrued to mean that the
data is somehow hidden. Encapsulation because it seals the data safely inside
the "capsule" of the class where it can be accessed only by trusted users.
Encapsulation can be described as a protective barrier that prevents the code
and data being randomly accessed by other code defined outside the class. Access
to the data and code is tightly controlled by an interface.
Advantage of Encapsulation:
- The fields of a class can be made
read-only or write-only.
- A class can have total control over what
is stored in its fields.
Example : This is the simple example of
a encapsulation
Code
public
class EncapTest{
private String
name;
private String
idNum;
private int
age;
public int
getAge(){
return age;
}
public String
getName(){
return name;
}
public String
getIdNum(){
return idNum;
}
public void
setAge( int newAge){
age = newAge;
}
public void
setName(String newName){
name = newName;
}
public void
setIdNum( String newId){
idNum = newId;
}
}
Summary :
The main benefit of encapsulation is
the ability to modify our implemented code without breaking the code of others
who use our code. With this feature Encapsulation gives maintainability,
flexibility and extensibility to our code.