Let’s start by focusing on encapsulation’s benefits to organizing our code by exploring some examples of encapsulation you may already be familiar with.

Packages

The Java and Python libraries are organized into discrete units called packages. The primary purpose of this is to separate code units that potentially use the same name, which causes name collisions where the compiler or interpreter isn’t sure which of the possibilities you mean in your program. This means you can use the same name to refer to two different things in your program, provided they are in different packages. Many other languages refer to these as namespaces.

For example, there are two definitions for a Date class in Java: java.util.Date and java.sql.Date. While they are related, they serve different purposes, and we wouldn’t want to get them confused. If we needed to create an instance of both in our program, we would use their fully-quantified name to help the compiler know which we mean:

Java

java.sql.Date sqlDate = new java.sql.Date(System.currentTimeMillis());
java.util.Date utilDate = new java.util.Date(System.currentTimeMillis());
System.out.println(sqlDate.toString());
System.out.println(utilDate.toString());

Running that code gives this output:

2020-12-30
Wed Dec 30 17:23:50 GMT 2020

So, as we can see, these two classes are functionally different in some important ways.

While Java does not support aliases in imports, we can use an alias in Python to import two classes with the same name using different identifiers. For example, if there are two User classes in different packages, we could import them like this:

Python

from package_one import User as PackageOneUser
from package_two import User as PackageTwoUser

user_1 = PackageOneUser.User()
user_2 = PackageTwoUser.User()

Encapsulating code within a package helps ensure that the types defined within are only accessible with a fully qualified name, or when the using directive is employed. In either case, the intended type is clear, and knowing the package can help other programmers find the type’s definition.

Creating Packages

We can also declare our own packages, allowing us to use packages to organize our own code just as Java and Python have done with their standard libraries. Below are quick examples for how to do this in Java and Python.

Java

To create a class ClassName in a package cc410.package_name, we would include a package line at the top of the file:

package cc410.package_name;

public class ClassName{
    //code here
}

The ClassName.java file would be stored in app/src/main/java/cc410/package_name/. Basically, the package name corresponds to the folders where the source code is stored.

Python

To create a class ClassName in a package cc410.package_name, we would simply place ClassName.py in the src/cc410/package_name directory. We’d also need to include an __init__.py file in that directory to make it a package.

Finally, if we want the cc410 package to act as a meta-package and be executable we would also include an __init__.py and a __main__.py file in the src/cc410 directory as well.