Last month we were coding some Groovy stuff and we needed to use Enum equivalents of couple Strings. We had couple dynamic Strings coming from off-shore developers, which defines the type of the entity. In our system, those types were represented by Enums. Anyways, basically we had to resolve the Enums from given Strings. After a little reading, we came up with following solution:

I’m sure every Java developer has had some hard times with NPEs (NullPointerException) since Java doesn’t really have a nice mechanism to avoid them :) Let’s recall something here: NPE is a run time exception and it occurs in the run time, therefore it means it is a design mistake, bad code quality or careless programming. Anyways, whatever the reason is, we all see NPEs all over our codes :) In this post, I want to cover this issue and give some tips from my experience so far.

Before talking about Static Initializer, I wanna talk a little bit about what is this static thingy in Java.