Private Method Patterns

Typically a class is designed to offer a well-defined and related set of services to its clients.

These services are offered in the form of its methods, which constitute the overall behavior of that object.

Some of these methods may use the functionality offered by other methods or even other objects to perform the task they are designed for. Not all methods of a class are always meant to be used by external client objects.

Those methods that offer defined services to different client objects make up an object’s public protocol and are to be declared as public methods.

Some of the other methods may exist to be used internally by other methods or inner classes of the same object.

The Private Methods pattern recommends designing such methods as private methods.

In Java, a method signature starts with an access specifier (private/protected/public).

Access specifiers indicate the scope and visibility of a method/variable.

A method is declared as private by using the “private” keyword as part of its signature.