Encapsulation vs Data Hiding - Java

Question

Interviewer: What is encapsulation and how do you achieve it in Java?

Me: Encapsulation is a mechanism to hide

Answer 1

Encapsulation: Take the example of a capsule. If you open it, it contains a lot of ingredients in it. Object Oriented programming's Encapsulation is also like that. As the name suggests "Encapsulation means to encapsulate (make a capsule of) all the data members, attributes and corresponding methods within one single capsule.

How do you do it: Lets say you made a class named "Car". Now car has a color price and model. These are attributes, and it has a run method. So here you've encapsulated all these attributes and methods of a vehicle named "Car". When you create an instance of car like so

Car myCar = new Car();

You can access all the attributes of Car using the myCar variable.

"Data hiding": Data hiding is controlled in Java using access modifiers. To access the data members you use ACCESSORS while to modify the data you use "Mutators". Java doesn't provide accessors and mutators by itself, you create them yourself (getters and setters). While C# provides PROPERTIES to do so.