Getters and Setters in Java convention

Question

My Java is a bit rusty (been doing C# for the last couple of years). Also I hope this won't be a very subjective question.

Anyway say I had class Person (yeah a bit of a cliche, I know), with no behaviour (C# version):

public class Person 
{
   public string Name { get; set; }
   public int Age { get; set; }
   // say 10+ properties
}

How would the equivalent Java version look like ? I know I can write bunch of getters and setters (but say I had 10+ properties), it feels like a lot of boilerplate. Is it considered bad practice to just do:

public class Person {
   public String name;
   public int age;
   // rest of the stuff here
}

I feel a bit uneasy about this. I realise there is no "right answer" but, I'm more interested in the general conventions and best practices.

Answer 1

You should write getters and setters. Or better - let your IDE generate them automatically. Otherwise you break the encapsulation. Also maybe you need just a getter.

Another advantage of using a getter or setter can be doing some checks or preprocessing before returning or setting the field.

Here is a sample code snippet:

private String name;

public String getName() {
   return this.name;
}

public void setName(String name) {
   this.name = name;
}

Optionally you can use http://projectlombok.org/ and write it like this using annotations:

@Getter @Setter
private String name;

The code generation is done compile time.