Object Copying and Encapsulation

This lecture delves deeper into the concept of object copying in Java, covering defensive copying, shallow copy, deep copy, and polymorphic copying. It explores the importance of encapsulation in ensuring data integrity and access control, highlighting the risks of encapsulation leaks. Through examples, it demonstrates the challenges of encapsulation breaches and the need for defensive copying to protect against them. The lecture also discusses mutable and immutable classes, emphasizing the significance of defensive copying for mutable objects. It concludes with a discussion on the official Java method for object cloning, comparing it with constructor-based copying and addressing the complexities of implementing the Cloneable interface.