getter方法和返回实例变量状态的方法之间的区别？

Question

I am reading through the Guava library, and I keep running into methods that look something like this:

@Override public int size() {
  return size;
}

What is the difference (strategically, conventionally, etc) between the above and the following?

@Override public int getSize() {
  return size;
}

Or is there no difference? Is it just shorthand?

Answer 1

One form isn't using JavaBeans conventions . Functionally speaking, systems that expect you to follow those conventions will not work or be very cumbersome to set up if you use non-conventional getters/setters for your beans, but if you're not , then there's no real difference.

Since Guava has a lot of collections, and the Collection interface actually defines a size() method , my gut tells me that Guava is more inclined to follow the Collection interface than JavaBeans conventions.

Answer 2

• In terms of performance there is no difference.
• In terms of readability they are also similar but getAttribute says more about what this method does ( size can imply that we need to do some additional calculations, getters in most cases simply returns value).
• But I suspect that main reason that people tend to name their methods as get/set... is to let their class become proper JavaBean which will be properly handled by tools which are using JavaBeans like Expression Language .

Anyway about your example. I suspect that since List s are not supposed to be treated as JavaBean s there is no requirement to return size with getSize() so simple size() is enough.