Interviewer: What is encapsulation and how do you achieve it in Java?
Me: Encapsulation is a mechanism to hide information from the client. The information may be data or implementation or algorithm. We achieve this using access modifiers.
Interviewer: This is data hiding. How do we achieve encapsulation in Java?
Me: uummmm
Concrete Question: Other than 'Access Modifiers', what is the way to implement Encapsulation in Java?
Encapsulation Encapsulation is an object-oriented programming concept that binds together the data and functions that manipulate the data, and that keeps both safe from outside interference and misuse. Data encapsulation led to the important OOP concept of data hiding.
If a class does not allow calling code to access internal object data and permits access through methods only, this is a strong form of abstraction or information hiding known as encapsulation. Some languages (Java, for example) let classes enforce access restrictions explicitly, for example denoting internal data with the private keyword and designating methods intended for use by code outside the class with the public keyword. Methods may also be designed public, private, or intermediate levels such as protected (which allows access from the same class and its subclasses, but not objects of a different class). In other languages (like Python) this is enforced only by convention (for example, private methods may have names that start with an underscore). Encapsulation prevents external code from being concerned with the internal workings of an object. This facilitates code refactoring, for example allowing the author of the class to change how objects of that class represent their data internally without changing any external code (as long as "public" method calls work the same way). It also encourages programmers to put all the code that is concerned with a certain set of data in the same class, which organizes it for easy comprehension by other programmers. Encapsulation is a technique that encourages decoupling.
Basically Data encapsulation is a process while data hiding is a technique . In encapsulation data can be public or private but in data hiding data is only private. So data hiding uses Encapsulation but it also uses different techniques to keep data permitted to authorized access only. Hope it helps!
Abstraction says that what needed to interact with object.
Encapsulation means encapsulate object properties , state and behaviours into single logical unit called class.
Data hiding says that hiding inner implementation of objects means private methods and properties, the object that use to maintain their state.
