Question

I’m fairly new to Java so forgive me for asking what may appear to be a stupid question.

I am writing a simple ‘user login’ program. To check whether the username and password match, I could either use a simple boolean variable or use a boolean method and return the value as true or false.

public boolean match() {
    if(userField.getText().equals(testUser)&&passField.getText().equals(testPass))
        return true;
    else
        return false;
}

Above is a very simple example of using a boolean method.

My question is, as a rule of thumb, what is the more favourable thing to use, a boolean method or a variable? I understand that this might be more of a personal preference thing for the programmer but I don’t understand why you would choose one over the other.

Answer 1

1. Use a method so subclasses could override and define their own matching.
2. You should always keep fields/member variables private and give access to them via methods.

Ideally you should abstract out the match method in to an interface and have implementations override the match() method