Modern IDEs such as IntelliJ Idea will compose a set of getters and setters for you, given just the private instance variables.

Normally within a class you don’t usually use the setters; you go direct to the underlying instance variables, though sometimes it makes sense from a maintenance point of view to channel through setters. Within a package or from outside, you would nearly always go through setters rather than going to directly to public instance variables.

You can also write setters for static variables.