Shaun Abram
Technology and Leadership Blog
Immutability
Immutable classes are inherently thread safe, and can only ever be in a single state. A class can be made immutable by:
- all fields being final and private
- no mutator (setter) methods
- class can’t be extended (e.g. make final) to avoid subclasses making things mutable
- provide exclusive access to any mutable components (e.g. getters provide defensive copies of collections)
See Item 15:Minimize mutability in Effective Java for more details.
Tags: effectivejava, immutable