getters and setters

[John Kirvan]

Does anyone have a link to a good tutorial about getters and setters methods and how I could use them to set values to elements in an array???

[Pradeep Kadambar]

A good programmer never exposes his fields in a class. So to access them getters and setters methods are used. These are simple methods in structure and function.

A typical example would be like.

  
private int varInt;
private HashMap varMap;

public int getVarInt() {
return varInt;
}
 
public void setVarInt(int varInt) {
this.varInt = varInt;
}
 
public HashMap getVarMap() {
return varMap;
}
 
public void setVarMap(HashMap varMap) {
this.varMap = varMap;
}

If you want to avoid the dilema of writing these methods every time use a good IDE like Eclipse which will do this for you.

[Ilja Preuss]

Originally posted by Pradeep KG:
A good programmer never exposes his fields in a class. So to access them getters and setters methods are used.

And an even better programmer does expose as few data as possible at all, not even through getters and setters, but prefers to expose behaviour.