public and private access modifiers

Question

if we can access the private members through setters and getters then what is the use of private ? thanks in advance

Answer 1

Because the getters and setters can act as a proxy. They make it so that you can hide the actual insides of the class, and only let the outside classes access the data through methods. Allowing you to treat the inners of the class however you want.

Just because your getter/setter is named getName() and your property is called name, doesn't mean it will always be that way.

What if you wanted to change the variable to be fullName. If you directly accessed public variables, the change would break a lot of code. Instead, you can simply remap where getName() retrieves its data from.

One of my best examples of this is my own URL class, where I allow for creating and manipulating a URL. If you want to set the scheme, you can get $obj->setScheme(). However, you don't know whether I am manually making the string every time you change the URL, whether I am storing them as separate parts. This gives me flexibility as I can store your data however I want to.

Furthermore, I can preform manipulations on the data before storing it. In my URL class, I assume that all schemes and host names are lowercase. I can standardize this by converting all strings saved via setHost() to lowercase, and then storing them. If I used a public variable, you would have to assume that the client that put the data in was correctly storing it.

They can also validate information that is being passed in to make sure that it is valid data, and cause an error if it isn't.

Answer 2

No one forces you to put in getters and setters for every variable. Indeed, blindly using private members + dummy getters & setters for every variable is pointless, even though many "object oriented encapsulation" tutorials do this all the time for some reason. For one thing, such encapsulation is no encapsulation from concurrency viewpoint.

Answer 3

I think what you really want to understand is why we use public properties with private backing fields, instead of just using public fields. There are several questions on SO like this; here's one:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/295104/what-is-the-difference-between-a-field-and-a-property-in-c

Answer 4

You need the private to enforce Encapsulation. It is one of the fundamental paradigm of Object Oriented programming to keep the implementation of something separate from the interface. This reduces the coupling between your different program parts and in the long run make it more maintainable.

Take the following example :

class toto {
  private String someThing;

  public String getSomething();
  public void setSomething(String Something);
}

If you change above to simply put someThing public, sure you have less code, but if one day that someThing needs to change to a more complex object for some new functionality while the old code could still work fine with a string then you need to change everything. By isolating the internal representation of someThing you can evolve your system much more easily

class toto {
  private ComplexSomeThing someThing;

  public String getSomething(){ someThing.toString();}
  public void setSomething(String something){ something = new ComplexSomeThing(something);}
  public ComplexSomeThing (getComplexSomething();
  public void setComplexSomething(ComplexSomething someThing);
}

There are other reasons that makes encapsulation a Good Thing (tm), this is just a silly example to illustrate the point.

---

EDIT There is somewhat of a debate right now as to using protected vs private or to use concepts akin to properties in some languages (Delphi, C#) rather than getters and setters (as in Java). Protected rather than private will allow easier changes by the clients of the code but it does expose the innards of your system more so there is a balance to strive for between usability of the API and it's maintainability. However the basic principle of encapsulation remains. Whatever the option chosen one still needs to expose functionality that is coherent and on the same level of abstraction and hide the gory details of how this is done.

To me the debate is not to declare a jihad against private but to find a way to provide extensibility and flexibility while not breaking the coherence of the API.

Here some interesting reading about private if you want to dig further. However I must stress that before forming an opinion about private you should really master the concepts of encapsulation and polymorphism, their apparent simplicity does hides some subtle complexities.

Answer 5

I think you have good answers so far (information hiding and all that). Just want to add a suggestion about using setters.

As you mentioned using accessors makes private variables a bit pointless and in some environments performance consequence of using getters and setters just makes it worthless.

On the other hand if you don't have such concerns, I think using getters isn't so bad, but you should think twice before using setters. They make your object mutable which is especially hard to maintain in concurrent environments.