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In software systems, encapsulation refers to the bundling of data with the mechanisms or methods that operate on the data. It may also refer to the limiting of direct access to some of that data, such as an object's components. [1] Essentially, encapsulation prevents external code from being concerned with the internal workings of an object.
Access modifiers are a specific part of programming language syntax used to facilitate the encapsulation of components. [1] In C++, there are only three access modifiers. C# extends the number of them to six, [2] while Java has four access modifiers, but three keywords for this purpose. In Java, having no keyword before defaults to the package ...
Encapsulation also protects the integrity of the component, by preventing users from setting the internal data of the component into an invalid or inconsistent state. Another benefit of encapsulation is that it reduces system complexity and thus increases robustness, by limiting the interdependencies between software components.
Encapsulation is a means of information hiding. [2] Layered designs in information systems are another embodiment of separation of concerns (e.g., presentation layer, business logic layer, data access layer, persistence layer). [3] Separation of concerns results in more degrees of freedom for some aspect of the program's design, deployment, or ...
In computer programming, field encapsulation involves providing methods that can be used to read from or write to the field rather than accessing the field directly. Sometimes these accessor methods are called getX and setX (where X is the field's name), which are also known as mutator methods.
These simplified accessors still retain the advantage of encapsulation over simple public instance variables, but it is common that, as system designs progress, the software is maintained and requirements change, the demands on the data become more sophisticated. Many automatic mutators and accessors eventually get replaced by separate blocks ...
For example, in Java, the Comparable interface specifies a method compareTo() which implementing classes must implement. This means that a sorting method, for example, can sort a collection of any objects of types which implement the Comparable interface, without having to know anything about the inner nature of the class (except that two of ...
In other words, it is better to compose what an object can do than extend what it is . [ 1 ] Initial design is simplified by identifying system object behaviors in separate interfaces instead of creating a hierarchical relationship to distribute behaviors among business-domain classes via inheritance.