We said that the class is made public , so anyone could use it to make their own BA's from. But we will certainly not let anyone else touch the stuff we have within our BA object. Now only methods within the class could change or access the data. There are other access modifiers as well, that we'll discuss when we encounter them. Now we have to make ourselves several methods, a few already mentioned, which we could start with.
Any method is put within the body of the class.
It is an easy method to write and it's self-explanatory. If any thing goes wrong Java tries to give us a clue of what happened. Or by ourselves if we like to. Usually it returns a String, telling us a few details, and so give us an identifying description. A future column will discuss protected methods.