It is a common practice in object-oriented programming to define class fields as private and make their values available only through public methods.

Many of the examples used in this documentation render fields public to make examples more compact and easier to read. Using public fields in SQL Anywhere also offers a performance advantage over accessing public methods.

The general convention followed in this documentation is that a user-created Java class designed for use in SQL Anywhere exposes its main values in its fields. Methods contain computational automation and logic that may act on these fields.