I got that same thing from the article, but that goes against everything the
OO folks in CF-land (Sean, foremost among them) has been preaching. So,
frankly, I'm confused as to what is being suggested here.
I've always said not to expose your instance data directly - no 'this' scope (no 'public' data in other languages). However, that doesn't mean that you should simply write a public get/set method for every attribute!
If I've got a Person and a PersonPersister (to use someone else's example),
and I say something like:
personPersisterInstance.savePerson(personInstance)
Should the PersonPerister not call the getFirstName(), getLastName(), etc.
Your Person and PersonPersister class are closely coupled by definition. It is reasonable to use something like a Memento design pattern to transfer data between the two classes as a single unit rather than making multiple method calls. Apart from anything else, that reduces the amount of code changes required should you add a new field (you don't need to add new get/set methods). It also sits well with the idea of having variables.instance (or variables.memento) as a struct containing the lump of data you might want to pass to the persister.
Note that in C++, you'd probably side-step this entire issue by declaring the persister as a friend of the class that it persists (an old joke in C++ circles: "Definition of a friend? Someone who has access to your private parts").
I just KNOW that Sean isn't proposing public data members (personInstance.firstName), is he? ;)
You KNOW correctly!
Sean A Corfield -- http://www.corfield.org/blog/
"If you're not annoying somebody, you're not really alive." -- Margaret Atwood
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