6.8.4 Field Names

Names of fields that are not final should be in mixed case with a lowercase first letter and the first letters of subsequent words capitalized. Note that well-designed Java classes have very few public or protected fields, except for fields that are constants (final static fields) (§6.8.5).

Fields should have names that are nouns, noun phrases, or abbreviations for nouns. Examples of this convention are the fields buf, pos, and count of the class java.io.ByteArrayInputStream (§22.6) and the field bytesTransferred of the class java.io.InterruptedIOException (§22.30.1).

Hiding involving field names is rare.

• If a field name hides a package name, then an import declaration (§7.5) can usually be used to make available the type names declared in that package.
• If a field name hides a type name, then a fully qualified name for the type can be used.
• Field names cannot hide method names.
• If a field name is hidden by a declaration of a parameter or local variable, then the name of the parameter or local variable can be changed without affecting other Java code.