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In software systems, encapsulation refers to the bundling of data with the mechanisms or methods that operate on the data. It may also refer to the limiting of direct access to some of that data, such as an object's components. [1] Essentially, encapsulation prevents external code from being concerned with the internal workings of an object.
Data encapsulation, also known as data hiding, is the mechanism whereby the implementation details of a class are kept hidden from the user. The user can only perform a restricted set of operations on the hidden members of the class by executing special functions commonly called methods to prevent attributes of objects from being easily viewed and accessed.
In computer programming, field encapsulation involves providing methods that can be used to read from or write to the field rather than accessing the field directly. Sometimes these accessor methods are called getX and setX (where X is the field's name), which are also known as mutator methods.
In this sense, the idea of encapsulation is more general than how it is applied in object-oriented programming. For example, a relational database is encapsulated in the sense that its only public interface is a query language (such as SQL), which hides all the internal machinery and data structures of the database management system. As such ...
Accessor methods are used to read the data values of an object. Mutator methods are used to modify the data of an object. Manager methods are used to initialize and destroy objects of a class, e.g. constructors and destructors. These methods provide an abstraction layer that facilitates encapsulation and modularity.
If the data access layer supports multiple database types, the application becomes able to use whatever databases the DAL can talk to. In either circumstance, having a data access layer provides a centralized location for all calls into the database, and thus makes it easier to port the application to other database systems (assuming that 100% ...
A PHAR file allows for a Tar, Zip or PHAR formatted archive. Regardless of format, each archive contains three sections: Stub — A PHP file that will bootstrap the archive. The stub must contain the __HALT_COMPILER(); token, and the default stub includes the ability to run a PHAR with or without the PHP extension enabled [7]
In a typical class hierarchy in object-oriented programming, each subclass can encapsulate data unique to that class. The metadata used to perform virtual method lookup (for example, the object's vtable pointer in most C++ implementations) identifies the subclass and so effectively acts as a tag identifying the data stored by the instance (see ...