Information Hiding - Encapsulation

Encapsulation

In his book on object-oriented design, Grady Booch defined encapsulation as "the process of compartmentalizing the elements of an abstraction that constitute its structure and behavior; encapsulation serves to separate the contractual interface of an abstraction and its implementation."

The purpose is to achieve potential for change: the internal mechanisms of the component can be improved without impact on other components, or the component can be replaced with a different one that supports the same public interface. Encapsulation also protects the integrity of the component, by preventing users from setting the internal data of the component into an invalid or inconsistent state. Another benefit of encapsulation is that it reduces system complexity and thus increases robustness, by limiting the interdependencies between software components.

In this sense, the idea of encapsulation is more general than how it is applied in OOP: for example, a relational database is encapsulated in the sense that its only public interface is a Query language (SQL for example), which hides all the internal machinery and data structures of the database management system. As such, encapsulation is a core principle of good software architecture, at every level of granularity.

Encapsulating software behind an interface allows the construction of objects that mimic the behavior and interactions of objects in the real world. For example, a simple digital alarm clock is a real-world object that a lay person can use and understand. They can understand what the alarm clock does, and how to use it through the provided interface (buttons and screen), without having to understand every part inside of the clock. Similarly, if you replaced the clock with a different model, the lay person could continue to use it in the same way, provided that the interface works the same.

In the more concrete setting of an object-oriented programming language, the notion is used to mean either an information hiding mechanism, a bundling mechanism, or the combination of the two. (See Encapsulation (object-oriented programming) for details.)