Create Access Modifier

There are two main access modifiers that are placed in front of the field or class name:

• public—the field is accessible from ALL classes.
• private—the field is accessible only within its OWN class.

To enforce the concept of encapsulation, it is common practice to make fields private by adding private access modifiers so that they can only be DIRECTLY accessed from a class. However, they can be accessed INDIRECTLY by adding public access modifiers to getter/setter methods to ascertain the field values when needed.

Because a class is needed to instantiate an object the public access modifier is typically added to the class definition (e.g., public class myClassDefinition).