How to hide a public method?

Question

I have a method in my static state machine that is only used once when my application is first fired up. The method needs to be public, but I still want it hidden. Is there a way to use an annotation or something that will hide the method from the rest of the project?

Answer 1

You cannot make a public method hidden (unless you can declare it private). You can however put in a subclass and only let the users of the object know the type of the superclass, that is:

class A {
   //Externally visible members
}

class B extends A {
   //Secret public members
}

Then you instantiate the class B, but only let the type A be known to others...