Question

What does the term wrapper mean?

Developers often say: “I’m going to build a wrapper around this piece of code.”

What does it mean?

Answer 1

A wrapper is a very generic term, but it is commonly used to create a programmer-defined function or class around a primitive data type or built-in function.

This can be done for many reasons, but it’s typically to introduce another level of abstraction, so that changes to common functions or routines will only need to be made in one place.

e.g.

Integer is a wrapper for the primitive type int in Java.

You can also create a wrapper around a console print line statement like so:

public void printStuff(String s) {
  System.out.println(s);
}