OOP Programming Question

Question

Hi,
Im new to oop in as3.0, just finished my first oop application but there is one thing that i don't understand.
If i have movieclips on the stage and i want for ex. the display class to control there position and size then
i need to send it from the document class to the display class using a public method on the display class.
but after developing my first application i got to a point that all of my methods on the display class were public
and i used a lot of repatitive code.... ive been told that i need to avoid public methods and try and keep most of the methods in
the different classes private but the only way to do it is to find a way to pass the movie clip instance to the actual class and control it
and this way most of the methods in the class will be private and the code on the document class will be a lot more cleaner, but i dont really
know how to pass a display object to a different class and use it without passing it to a public method through the document class.

Answer 1

I'm relatively new to OOP programming, so please
excuse this newbish question :).
I've been assigned to take over for a co-worker that
has left for vacation. A class that he wrote is
partially implemented, so I'm supposed to finish it
up.
One class in particular, his constructor is empty.That's fine, if that's what makes sense. I'd have one constructor that set all the private data members. Other constructors would call it using sensible defaults where needed.
If the ctor is empty and data members are null, that's very bad. An object should be 100 percent ready to go when you create it.
And to set the instance variables, the user class is
setting them directly, not through accessor methods.So the data members are public? Oh, my. Where's the encapsulation?
This seems like a bad idea, and defeats the whole
purpose of encapsulation. Indeed. Sounds like you know more than your co-worker.
I wanted to re-do some of the code, but are there any
good reasons as to why he might be doing this?If it's a DTO C-struct with no other purpose than ferrying data it might be acceptable. I would say it's not acceptable, but that's my opinion.
Saving some overhead maybe?No, the "overhead" is probably not measurable. I wouldn't optimize such a thing without data that told me it was the bottleneck, and I'd make sure that this "fix" did address the problem before I cast it in stone.
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