The Object-Oriented Thought Process, Fourth Edition

Attributes

Attributes represent the state of the object because they store the information about the object. For our example, the Cabbie class has attributes that store the name of the company, the name of the cabbie, and the cab assigned to the cabbie. For example, the first attribute stores the name of the company:

private static String companyName = "Blue Cab Company";

Note here the two keywords private and static. The keyword private signifies that a method or variable can be accessed only within the declaring object.

Hiding as Much Data as Possible

All the attributes in this example are private. This is in keeping with the design principle of keeping the interface design as minimal as possible. The only way to access these attributes is ...