Brian Goetz's Good Housekeeping Practices

It will have escaped very few readers of my blog, recent articles and conference presentation proposals that Java clean-up is my current obsession (if that's not too strong a word). Those of you who fall into that category should think yourselves lucky you don't have to work with me at the moment, as my team is getting it worse!

My frustration stems from the large amount of Java based material out there that just ignores the issues involved in cleaning up in Java. Maybe it's mindset that says the garbage collector and finalizers will handle everything. Even thought it appears to be well documented that finalizers are not called until garbage collection and then there is no guarantee that they will be called at all, the penny does not seem to drop with a lot of Java programmers, except those of course who have come from a real C++ background.

It's always reassuring to find evidence that other people have been thinking along the same lines as yourself, so I was very grateful when Hubert Matthews was kind enough to point me in the direction of Brian Goetz's Good housekeeping practices article.

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Paul Grenyer

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