Why should we use getters and setters in POJOs?

There are quite a few reasons to use getters and setters in POJO.

Let's first take a look at a simple POJO and then we will discuss the uses of getter and setter:

package com.prinavtech.types;

public class Employee {

    private String firstName;
    private String middleName;
    private String lastName;

    public String getFirstName() {
      return firstName;
    }
    public void setFirstName(String firstName) {
       this.firstName = firstName;
    }
    public String getMiddleName() {
        return middleName;
    }
    public void setMiddleName(String middleName) {
         this.middleName = middleName;
    }
    public String getLastName() {
        return lastName;
    }
    public void setLastName(String lastName) {
        this.lastName = lastName;
    }

    public String getFullName(){
        return this.getFirstName() + this.getMiddleName() +  this.getLastName();
    }
 }

Getters and Setters are primarily used for two main purposes of Object Oriented Programming:

1. Abstraction
2. Encapsulation

The advantages of using these are:

1. You can restrict the accessibility of an attribute by using access modifiers.
   Eg: We can make FirstName readable only by making the getter private

2. Can validate a field directly inside a pojo.
Eg: we can make sure that the age of a Person can be between 0<100.

3. The above two points are in support of Encapsulation and Abstraction.

4. In Java if you declare the variables as instance variables, it will make your code slower. Run a test and you will see that accessing and setting variables via setters and getters are faster than setting them directly as instance variables.

For more read this stackoverflow post.

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