Java Encapsulation | Does Static break Encapsulation

What is encapsulation and why is it used.?

Encapsulation is one of the four fundamental OOP concepts.Encapsulation is the technique of making the fields in a class private and providing access to the fields via public methods. If a field is declared private, it cannot be accessed by anyone outside the class, thereby hiding the fields within the class. For this reason, encapsulation is also referred to as data hiding.

Encapsulation can be described as a protective barrier that prevents the code and data being randomly accessed by other code defined outside the class. Access to the data and code is tightly controlled by an interface.

The main benefit of encapsulation is the ability to modify our implemented code without breaking the code of others who use our code. With this feature Encapsulation gives maintainability, flexibility and extensibility to our code.

Take a small example:

public class EncapTest{

   private String name;
   private String idNum;
   private int age;

   public int getAge(){
      return age;
   }

   public String getName(){
      return name;
   }

   public String getIdNum(){
      return idNum;
   }

   public void setAge( int newAge){
      age = newAge;
   }

   public void setName(String newName){
      name = newName;
   }

   public void setIdNum( String newId){
      idNum = newId;
   }
}
The above methods are called Accessors(aka getters and setters). Now you might ask,

Why should you use accessors..? There are actually many good reasons to consider using accessors rather than directly exposing fields of a class.Getter and Setters make APIs more stable.
For instance, consider a field public in a class which is accessed by other classes. Now later on, you want to add any extra logic while getting and setting the variable. This will impact the existing client that uses the API. So any changes to this public field will require change to each class that refers it. On the contrary, with accessor methods, one can easily add some logic like cache some data, lazily initialize it later. Moreover, one can fire a property changed event if the new value is different from the previous value. All this will be seamless to the class that gets value using accessor method.

static breaks encapsulation rule because it is possible to access it without settters or getters but directly. If you declare a variable like this : public static or static, when calling it from another class you can write : object.variable = value;.

The technical implementation of them is to allow state to be maintained across all instances of a class. The problem is that this is intrinsically not OOP because it disregards encapsulation. If a variable can be altered by any instance of a class then the fundamental principle behind encapsulation/information hiding is lost entirely: An object is no longer in complete control of its state. Its state now relies on variables which are essentially global. Which we know is bad. Even private static variables maintain state at a global level but simply limit its access. Any instance of the object can alter the static variable which causes ambiguity as individual instances of the object no longer have control over their own state. State changes can arbitrarily happen without knowledge of an object which relies on that state which is problematic because the object may not work correctly when this happens. Much as it's often said that "Inheritance breaks encapsulation" statics do this in a far more severe way: By not just exposing internal implementation but also by exposing internal state.