Continuing on Jeanne’s theme of nulls, its a pet peeve of mine when I come across code that returns null arrays instead of empty arrays. The purpose of this post is to discuss some of the reasons why its a good practice to return empty arrays over null arrays, including Collection objects or typed [...]

In Java, we’re told to check for nulls to avoid unexpected null pointer exceptions.  This can be taken too far though.  Consider the following code:

StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder():
if ( builder != null ) {
builder.append("data");
}

When did builder have the opportunity to become null? By definition, a constructor creates an object. We just called [...]