What are the alternatives to public fields?

Question

I am programming a game in java, and as the question title suggestions i am using public fields in my classes. (for the time being)

From what i have seen public fields a

Answer 1

One advantage not yet mentioned for avoiding public fields: if there aren't any public fields, one may define an interface that includes all the public features of the class, have the class implement that interface, and then have everyplace that uses the class use the interface instead. If that is done, one may later design a class which has completely different methods and fields, but which implements the same interface, and use that class interchangeably with the original. If this is done, it may be useful to have the class implement a static factory method in addition to the constructor, and have the factory return an object of the interface type. Doing that would allow later versions of the factory to return an object of some other type. For example, one may come up with a low-cost version of the object in which many properties return constants; the factory could see if such an object would be suitable, and if so return one instead of the normal object.

Incidentally, the concept of using a mixture of constant and mutable objects in an adventure goes back at least to 1980. In Warren Robinett's "Adventure" cartridge for the 2600, each object has a number of pointers stored in ROM for things like position and state, so objects which aren't going to move (such as the castle gates or the "signature") don't need to have their position stored in RAM, and most grabbable objects (which don't have any state other than their position) won't need to store a state in RAM, but animated objects like the dragons and bat can store both state and position in RAM. On a machine with 128 bytes of RAM total, such savings were critical.