Encapsulation
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, thereby hiding the fields
within the class. For this reason, encapsulation is also referred to as data hiding.
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.
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.
Example:
Let us look at an example that depicts encapsulation:
/* File name : EncapTest.java */
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;
}
