[josm-dev] Difference between JOSM and JOSM-NG

[Alexander Wright]

On Monday 11 August 2008 23:41:09 Gervase Markham wrote:

> This and other considerations mean that any book you read on Java best
> practice (or any object-oriented language, for that matter) will
> recommend that you make your variables private and use accessor methods.

Ok, so I can't really comment, as I've no time to spend on JOSM code, but that 
aside, I'd say that a very good reason to stick to OO best practise is one of 
unit testing.

Not having accessor methods (with bounds checking for variables!) means that 
its a lot more tricky to adequately unit test classes. 

If I change a private variable, is the class still in a self consistent state?

If the answer is "I can't tell" then you really should be using accessor 
methods.

Alex.