Introduction to Programming

Managing objects

You may not need to manage arrays and may even not need to manage collections (for some time, at least), but you cannot avoid managing objects, which means that the classes described in this section you are probably going to use every day.

Although the java.util.Objects class was added to the Java Standard Libraries in 2011 (with the Java 7 release), while the ObjectUtils class has existed in the Apache Commons libraries since 2002, their use grew slowly. This may be partially explained by the small number of methods they had originally—only six in ObjectUtils in 2003 and only nine in Objects in 2011. However, they were very helpful methods that could make the code more readable and robust—less prone to errors. So, why these ...