25 ms·

That examples makes sense, but what about Strings and other types? I'm not sure you can do the same thing for a User object with name, age etc. I'd love to not

• arjie 12y ago
  That's a Plain Old Data object and back in the day the Sun Java Coding Conventions recommended public instance variables for classes which "would have been a struct if Java supported it" or something like that. I suppose it's all about behaviour. If the class is literally just a struct - a box for data, there's no functionality to describe. Choosing public instance variables vs. getter/setter is just a matter of choice at that point. The latter let you check Preconditions, etc. but that means that you actually have some invariant you intend to preserve (date of birth of the user cannot be in the future, for instance, so your well-formed user has some characteristics). Any members that can take any value their type permits should, in my opinion, just be public. Logically if you perceive that you could have some invariant in the near future, you'd want to have getters/setters but there's no point overdoing it.
• jsmeaton 12y ago
  The parent would have the `User` type as a value type, with read-only final fields.