In response to my recent blog posting Immutable Java Objects, Matt brought up a good point of discussion related to making Java classes truly immutable by declaring them as final so that they ...

To create a global constant shared by every instance of a class, you combine Java's static and final keywords. The static keyword means the value is the same for every instance of the class. Final ...

Java does enable the option to mark a class as final to eliminate the ability to perform inheritance complete, but that is often too heavy of a hammer to drop. Marking a class as final prevents all ...