What is the use of package level protection in java?

Question

I know how package level protection in java works. I read a lot of code (including lots of open source stuff) and no-one seem to be using it. The whole protection l

Answer 1

There are two good uses for package level visibility (in my experience):

1) Defining "internal" classes in a public API. Commonly you would define your interfaces and core factories as public and the "internal" implementations as package level. Then the public factories can construct the package level implementation classes and return them as instances of the public interfaces. This nicely allows users to only access the stuff they should.

The downside is that you have to have all this stuff in the same package, which almost never is a good idea for any reasonably-sized API. JSR 294/modules/Project Jigsaw in Java 7 will hopefully provide an alternative by specifying a new visibility modifier (module) that can be used to access classes within a module across packages without making them visible outside the module. You can find an example of how this would work in this article.

2) Unit testing is the other common use case. Frequently you'll see a src tree and a test tree and stuff that would otherwise be private is instead package level so that unit tests in the same (parallel) package are able to access otherwise hidden methods to check or manipulate state.