On May 9 2006, Nathan S. Haigh wrote: >Apologies if this comes through more than once - I forgot to send in plain >text without attachments! > >In case you don't know - I'm new to Java . > >I'm working out an interface/class structure for part of an app I want to >convert from Perl to Java and I have a question about the best way to >provide access to variables to the client programmer: > >Is it best to have variables you want the client programmer to access just >made public or is it best to provide access to them via a get/set method? >> From my limited reading of "Thinking in Java" I would think it best to >> hide >the implementation from the user and provide methods to access these >variables e.g. setThreshold and getThreshold modify the private variable >threshold - is that correct or am I way off the mark!? > Breaking object encapsulation is generally a bad thing in OO programming so, yes, avoid it when you can. We try to make it difficult to do so in BioJava anyway :-).
Regards, David _______________________________________________ Biojava-l mailing list - [email protected] http://lists.open-bio.org/mailman/listinfo/biojava-l
