Java’s equals() and hashcode() are two methods that work together to verify if two objects have the same value. You can use them to make object comparisons easy and efficient in your Java programs.

And by the way, just to give you an idea of the HashMap method -- uh, the hashCode method -- every time you create, um, an object in Java, each instance that you create gets assigned its own hashCode.

I introduced the issue of JAXB-generated classes not having explicitly overridden equals(Object), hashCode(), or toString() methods in the blog post Adding Common ...