Controlling Access to Class Members

The options you have for specifying the accessibility of a variable or a method in a class are:

Attribute	Permitted Access
No access attribute	From methods in any class in the same package
public	From methods in any class anywhere as long as the class has been declared as public
private	Accessible only from methods inside the class. No access from outside the class at all.
protected	From methods in any class in the same package and from any subclass anywhere.

This may sound more complicated than it actually is. The following image shows the access allowed between classes within the same package.



The next image shows the access allowed between classes in different packages.