gotchas : Java Glossary

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Gotchas
A gotcha is a nasty surprise in the Java language or the standard libraries. Some might call them bugs, some features. Sometimes they are the result of incompetence or carelessness on the part of the language designers and sometimes they are just quirky things that cannot be helped. Here is a chart of the some dangerous waters.

I spoke on this topic in 1997-11 at the Colorado Summit Conference and again in 1999-11.

Gotcha Difficulty
Inconsistent extensions 1
We Aren’t In Kansas Anymore
basic differences from C
1
Default Fall Through 1
String.replace 1
Microscopic Fonts 1
Separator vs Terminator 1
double Double Toil and Trouble 1
Inconsistencies 2
toString blues 2
Impotent Casts 2
Is char a character or a number? 2
Octal 2
The Case of The Disappearing Constructors 2
Missing Hex 2
Missing \u 2
Math.sin 2
Where’s the Beep? 2
Where’s the Root Directory? 2
for each 2
Unstoppable for 2
Lower Case Locale Error message 2
Upper Case Surprises 2
Shiftless Shift 2
String.substring 2
Incomparable NaN 2
String Comparison 2
StringBuffer.equals 2
ValueOf and null 2
Final vs Const 2
Overflow 2
BigDecimal Comparison 3
Override vs Shadow 3
broken setLocation, setSize, setBackground, setForeground 3
Unsigned Bytes 3
Modulus 3
Array Initialisation 3
Array Comparison 3
new Comparable 3
Matrix Initialisation 3
ArrayStoreException arrays of Dogs and Dalmatians 3
Static Initialisers 3
Instance Initialisers 3
Constructor Initialisation 3
Casts Dalmatians are Dogs 3
Implicit Casts 3
Concatenation 3
addChangeListener 3
M y O u t p u t L o o k s L i k e T h i s 3
Cascaded Assignment Operators 3
Pseudo Random Numbers 3
Finalizers Are Not Destructors 3
Finally 3
Thread Safety 3
java.math.BigDecimal 3
java.util.Date 4
java.util.GregorianCalendar 4
java.awt.Graphics.drawRect 4
java.awt.Graphics.drawString 4
GridBagLayout 4
Null Layout 4
Deprecation Blues 4
java.io.BufferedReader & BufferedInputStream 4
Applets Can’t Use The Local Hard Disk 4
Reconstituted Serialized Objects 4
Broken Repaint 4
Hidden Components Won’t Stay Hidden 4
Dialog.setBackground Does Not Work 4
Threads 4
Socket To Me 4
Keystroke Names 4
JSP Import Blues 4
TableCellRenderer 4
Misleading Error Messages 5
Credits -
Books -

Inconsistent Extensions

Sometimes the extension should be obvious, e.g. *.java when compiling, or *.class when executing. You would think the extension would be optional. It is not. Sometimes you must specify it and sometimes you must not. And sometimes you can get away with doing it either way, on some platforms. Here are the rules that will always work.
Inconsistent Extensions
Where Extension Mandatory? Example
compiling mandatory
CD \MyDir
javac.exe -classpath . HelloWorld.java
executing must exclude
CD \MyDir
java.exe -classpath . HelloWorld
Applet mandatory
<applet
code="HelloWorld.class"
width="230"
height="240">
<img src="image/NoJava4U.jpg">
</applet>

We Aren’t In Kansas Anymore

C/C++ programmers will attempt to write code like

if ( width )
   {
   widen( width );
   }
if ( myDog )
   {
   myDog.bark();
   }
You need to spell these out longhand in Java :
if ( width != 0 )
   {
   widen( width );
   }
if ( myDog != null )
   {
   myDog.bark();
   }

However, for

if ( tooWide )
   {
   widen( width );
   }

Beware, you

if ( tooWide = true )
   {
   widen( width );
   }
Note: that the = above is an assignment operator, not an == comparison operator. The if is always true.

Default Fall Through

C programmers are familiar with this, but those coming from languages designed by Professor Wirth will gasp in astonishment

switch ( k )
   {
   case 1:
      out.println( "hello" );
   case 2:
      out.println( "hi" );
   }
When k is 1, the program will print out both hello and hi. Case clauses fall though by default. You won’t get a syntax error or even a warning if you leave out the break after each case.

Because the syntax for defining cases and labels is so similar, it is easy to make an error like this: The programmer left out a space and, instead of handling n == 3, he defined a goto label called case3 in his switch statement.

In Java version 1.4 or later you can use the javac.exe -Xswitchcheck to get the compiler to warn you if you do this. However, there is no syntax to tell Java when you meant to do it deliberately, e. g. a break case or fallthru keyword.

String.replace

// String.replace produces a new String. It does not modify the original.
// Since String is immutable, no method can modify the original.

String aa = "peal";
String bb = aa.replace( 'a', 'e' );

out.println ( aa + " " + bb );
// Prints "peal peel" not "peel peel"
// Newbies often expect String aa to be changed too.
String. replace does not modify the input String. It could not, even if it wanted to, since Strings are immutable. Further, the Javadocs for replace explain that replace creates a new String.
Oracle’s Javadoc on String.replace : available:
This gotcha is not Oracle’s fault. The same applies to String. toUpperCase and String. toLowerCase.

Microscopic Fonts

Sometimes fonts will come out too tiny to see. Likely it means you have reversed the last two parameters when you created the font, an error the compiler cannot detect since Font does not use enums, just enumerated int constants.
// OOPS, DON'T DO THIS!
component.setFont( new Font( "Dialog", 12, Font.BOLD ));

// do this instead:
component.setFont( new Font( "Dialog", Font.BOLD, 12 ));

Font.createFont produces a font 1 point high, too tiny to see. You must use Font. deriveFont before you can use it.

Separator vs Terminator

Java is rather loosey goosey about the use of separators and a terminators.

double Double Toil and Trouble

The compiler for languages such as Eiffel goes through Houdiniesque contortions to let you treat primitives as objects while simultaneously giving primitives express treatment when you don’t need the objectness. In such languages, you can write code analogous to this:
/* This won’t work in Java ! */
int ii = -42;
int jj = ii.abs();
String s = ii.toString();
But in Java, you can’t use instance methods on primitives. However, you still need set of standard methods to deal with bytes, shorts, chars, ints, floats and doubles. So Sun created a set of classes called Byte, Short, Character (not Char), Integer (not Int), Float and Double. They wrote everything to fiddle with primitives as static methods! What else could they do?

You need to treat primitives as objects for another purpose — so that you can put them into containers such as ArrayLists or Vectors. In Java, you must manually wrap your primitive up in an object. Sun provides a set of immutable object wrapper classes called: Byte, Short, Character (not Char), Integer (not Int), Float and Double, the very same classes that house your static methods for fiddling with primitives! It might have been clearer had they called these classes names like ImmutableByte or ByteWrapper, but they didn’t. You can’t change the value of the primitive inside any of these wrapper objects. All you can do is create a new object with a new immutable primitive sitting inside.

To make matters all the more confusing, the Double class then has double duty, to deal with both double primitives and Double wrapper objects. The instance methods for Double manipulate Double objects and the static methods for Double manipulate double primitives. These methods naturally have similar if not identical names! The same problem occurs for all the other primitive/class pairs, but most newbies seem to trip over it first with

double d; /* double primitive */
Double dd; /* Double wrapper */
String g;
g = Double.toString( d ); /* double primitive */
g = dd.toString(); /* Double wrapper */
See the conversion for help in interconverting the various primitives and wrappers.

toString Blues

toString is defined on every object to allow you to convert it to a String. However, the String you get is often nothing like you would expect.

With the default toString, you just get the class name and hashCode of the object, which looks like gibberish, e.g. [C@ad3ba4.

char[] c = { 'a' , 'b' , 'c'};
out.println( c.toString() );
will print out the address of c, not the characters that compose it. You must use newString ( char[] ) to convert a char array to a String.

Label.toString() is not an alias for Label.getText(). It will print out a summary of the Label fields like this: java.awt.Label[label0,0,0,0x0,invalid,align=left,text=def]

How then do you convert to String? With a hodgepodge of techniques that rival French verbs for irregularity.

Impotent Casts

Casts that reasonable people would expect to work, are invalid in Java. For example, you can’t cast an int to a String or the reverse with (int) 42 or (String) 42. Instead you must use a hodge podge of methods to interconvert the basic types whose names are more chaotic than French irregular verbs. It is a disgrace. It is such a mess, that I wrote an Applet, called Converter to generate the necessary conversion code.

Is char a character or a number?

char can be thought of as a character or an unsigned 16-bit integer. This ambiguity catches up with us in a statement like this:
String x = "foo" + 's';
In Java version 1.6 or later, x is foos. In early Java version 1.2 it is foo115, but was fixed for the release version.

Octal

I have not seen octal used since the days of the Univac 1106 (except for Unix file permissions), however, Java has carried on the C and C++ tradition. Any numeric literal with a lead zero on it is considered base 8, octal. Beware, programmers are used to using lead zeros simply to align numbers in columns.

The Case of The Disappearing Constructors

When you define a constructor, you must not specify a return type, even though it behaves much like a static factory method that returns an object. You may not even specify a void return type. It is best to think of constructors as like parameterless instance methods that operate on the current object.

Even though a constructor is similar to static method that returns a new object, you may not declare the constructor static. It is not static, since it works on specific default object. this is defined in the constructor.

If you do any of these things, the compiler will think your constructor is just an ordinary method. You will be baffled by the compiler’s complaints that you have not defined a suitable constructor to match the arguments you provide.

It may help if you realise that new allocates/creates the object and the constructor initializes it. Therefore the constructor has no need to return an object.

If you don’t provide any constructors at all, Java will automatically provide you with a default constructor

public MyClass()
   {
   super();
   }
However, if you get ambitious and write an extra constructor, say like this:
private MyClass( int fudgicles )
   {
   this.fudgicles = fudgicles;
   }
The default constructor will disappear! You have to then provide it yourself explicitly.

You will most likely come across this problem when you see the following error message:

load: com.mindprod.mypackage.MyApplet.class can’t be instantiated. java.lang.InstantiationException: com/mindprod/mypackage/MyApplet

In English, it means you are missing the default public constructor for your Applet. See constructor.

Missing Hex

In Java Strings, you can no longer say "\xf2", "\a" or "\v" as you can in C++. Happily \n, ", \\ and \ still work. To encode control characters without specific abbreviations you must now use octal, e.g. \012 for a linefeed, formerly \x0a . Octal character constants must be exactly 3 digits. See literal

The new hex Unicode technique \u003f has a catch. It is not suitable for encoding control characters. It is evaluated in a pre-processor pass and converted to a character, then the code is compiled. If for example you wrote \u000a, this gets converted to:

"
"
Since the \u000a gets converted to a newline character. It definitely won’t work for Cr and Lf. It might work for some of the other control chars in some compilers. I suggest using the octal forms for safety.

Missing \u

to come.

Math.sin

Every

double x = 90;
double y = sin( x );
double z = tan( x + PI );
And stares and stares at it wondering why it won’t work. You need to write it this way:
// converting degrees to radians, manually.
static final double CONVERT_DEGREES_TO_RADIANS = Math.PI / 180;
double x = 90 * CONVERT_DEGREES_TO_RADIANS;
double y = Math.sin( x );
double z = Math.tan( x + Math.PI );
There are three places to trip up:
  1. the Math package works in radians, not degrees. 360 degrees = 2π radians.
  2. You need the Math.sin instead of plain sin because sin, cos, tan etc. are static functions. Compared with other languages you may have used, Java is picky and verbose. It wants the Math. even when there is no name clash with a sin function in some class other than Math or some package other than java.lang. Java wants to avoid even the possibility of an eventual name clash by making you qualify with Math.sin now. In a similar way, you must precede all static function and method invocations with the classname.
  3. You need the Math.PI instead of plain PI because PI is a static constant. In a similar way you must precede all static constants with the class name.
  4. Java version 1.2 has added two convenience methods:
    // built-in radians <-> degrees methods.
    public static double toDegrees ( double angleInRadians );
    public static double toRadians ( double angleInDegrees );
Math.sin(Double.PI) != 0 since Double.PI isn’t precisely equal to the irrational number PI. So Math.sin(Double.PI) shouldn’t be expected to be exactly equal to sin(PI). Similarly Math.cos( Math.toRadians( 90 ) ) is not bang on zero either.

Further, every time you do a floating point calculation you loose a little precision. It all adds up.

In Java 5.0 you no longer need the Math. in Math. sin() so long as you add an import like this:

import static java.lang.Math;

Where’s the Beep?

Java does not have a built-in set of sounds. You can also produce a beep send to the PC (Personal Computer) speaker by sending a BEL character to the console.
// beep on the PC speaker by sending a BEL character to the console
out.print ( "\007" );
out.flush();
It ignores '\a' in console output, though you can use \007 to get the BEL.

You can make a simple beep with  Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().beep() . I have seen reports that beep does not work properly on some platforms.

// beep via the console
out.print ( "\007" );
out.flush();

// beep via toolkit
Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().beep();
You can also play AU, wav, midi and aiff files with AudioClip.play.

Where’s the Root Directory?

You might look a long time through java.io.* trying to find the directory operations, before you find them hiding in the File class e.g. list a directory to find out the files

File dir = new File( "C:\\" );
String[] files = dir.list();

won’t

File dir = new File( "C:\\." );
String[] files =dir.list();
Be aware that \ in Java Strings has to be written as \\.

This makes reading Strings representing filenames confusing. Unix systems use the / path separator character instead of \. Macintoshes use : and have interesting twists like :: for up instead of /../ as in Unix. To write platform independent code, you should use the system properties file.separator and path.separator, or use the File methods that construct filenames for you from parts.

Then

File[] roots = File.listRoots();

For Each Gaps

for : pronounced for each is a shorthand extension to the regular for. It lets you iterate over Iterators, Collections and arrays with a terse syntax. However, it will not let you iterate over the characters of a String or let you access the index the way you do with a regular for, just the values. Look at the following example to see what I mean:

Unstoppable for

for ( long i=Long.MAX_VALUE -2; i<=Long.MAX_VALUE; i++ )
   {
   /* ...*/
   }
How many times will that for loop execute? Until you kill the process! It will loop endlessly because i can never get bigger than Long.MAX_VALUE to terminate the loop. There are similar problems with Integer.MAX_VALUE, Long.MIN_VALUE and Integer.MIN_VALUE. You get used to thinking of the upper limit as the logical stopping point, where canonical for loops actually stop on one past that value. The reason the loop does not terminate is Java integer arithmetic allows overflow as normal. The reason for this is most hardware behaves this way and much bit fiddling would be overly complicated if overflow threw exceptions. You can handle detection of numbers getting too big with an assert, which catches the problem long before they get close to overflowing 32 or 64 bits.

Lower Case Locale Error

You might inadvertently try writing some code like this:

String lower = String.toLowerCase( upper );
// should be
String lower = upper.toLowerCase();

The compiler will complain about incompatibility with the Locale type. What is going on? You have inadvertently used the String.toLowerCase( Locale locale ) method. What you meant to use was String.toLowerCase(). String. was taken to mean this.

Upper Case Surprises

Take a look at the source of java.lang.String.toUpperCase(). You might expect it to contain

if ( 'a' <= theChar && theChar <= 'z' ) theChar -= ('a' -'A' );
However, you will discover the code is quite elaborate. For example, it tests if the current locale is Turkish to call special code to cope with the dotless i. It tests for the German ß and converts it to a pair of letters SS ! If you are only working with English, you might want to roll your own more streamlined version. If you take a string to lower case then back to upper case then back to lower case, you won’t necessarily end up where you started.

String.substring

In other languages, to extract a substring, you give an offset where the string starts and a length in characters. In Java, you provide two zero-based offsets. The first points to the start of the string as you might expect and

"abcdefg".substring( 3, 5 ) gives "de".
"abcdefg".substring( 3, 7 ) gives "defg".
"abcdefg".substring( 3, 8 ) gives StringIndexOutOfBoundsException.

If you specify offsets that are outside the span of the string, you don’t get a truncated or null string; you raise a StringIndexOutOfBoundsException. One way to remember the way it works is that you specify the first character to include and the first character to exclude. But not quite. You are allowed to be just barely past the end.

"emptiness".substring( 9 )
returns "" (an empty string)
"emptiness".substring( 10 )
gives a StringIndexOutOfBoundsException

Why do it this way?

There is another way of looking at the indexing that fits the Java behaviour in a more natural way. The index does not identify a character in the string, it identifies a position between the characters of the string, starting at 0 and ending at the string length. For example, APPLE has indexing like this:
(0) A (1) P (2) P (3) L (4) E (5)

Then:

s = "APPLE".substring( 1, 4 ); // gives "PPL".
s = "APPLE".substring( 3, 3 ); // gives "".
s = "APPLE".substring( 0, 5 ); // gives "APPLE".
Beware of using substring with only one argument.
String tail = x.substring( endindex );

gets you the tail end of a string starting at endindex. It does not get you the beginning

head = x.substring( 0, length );
gets you the first part of the string, the first length characters.

Incomparable NaN (Not A Number)

When you divide by zero with double, take the square root of a negative number, overflow the maximum representable value etc. the result is a magic number called Double.NaN, Double.POSITIVE_INFINITY or Double.NEGATIVE_INFINITY. You

if ( Double.isNaN( d ) )

or with Double.isInfinite . You can’t test

if ( d == Double.NaN )

Because there are two different flavours of NAN, Double.POSITIVE_INFINITY and Double.NEGATIVE_INFINITY You can’t directly compare == Double.NAN to check for NAN. However, you can directly compare == Double.NAN; However, you can use  Double.isNaN or == to compare with Double.POSITIVE_INFINITY. There is a corresponding Float.NaN and  Float.isNaN The theory is making NaN not equal to itself allows a quick and dirty way to test for a calculation going haywire.

if ( result != result )
   {
   out.println( "oops" );
   }

StringBuffer.equals

Beware

The problem is StringBuffer.equals checks if two references point to the same StringBuffer, something you almost never want to do. StringBuilder has the same gotcha.

valueOf and null

int[] intArray = null;
String.valueOf( intArray ); // produces the String "null"
char[] charArray = null;
String.valueOf( charArray ); // throws NullPointerException

Final vs Const

Java has a keyword final and C++ has a keyword const. They are similar, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking they are identical. Declaring a variable final will prevent the value of that variable from being changed after initialisation. However, if that variable is a reference to an object, it will not necessarily prevent the various fields in that object from being changed, e. g.
final Thing thing = new Thing( 7 );
thing = otherThing;  // generates a compiler error
thing.setSize( 10 ); // ok
thing.girth = 6;     // ok
This also applies to parameters declared final.

Overflow

Java is cavalier about overflow. There are no compile-time warnings or run-time exceptions to let you know when your calculations have become too big to store back in an int or long. There is no warning for float or double overflow either. One place you often get nailed is when some calculations are done as int, high order parts are truncated, then promoted to long.

Watch

IBM (International Business Machines) ’s BigDecimal and Arcimath BigDecimal have provisions for detecting overflow and generating an exception. You can roll your own with code like this in standard Java.

or

If you know both values are positive, you can use a simpler overflow check. You could check if the sum is less than 0 or less than one of the two operands. I’m not sure if this catches all overflows, however.

Floating point arithmetic uses the IEEE (Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers) error propagating scheme similar to that used in a spreadsheet to propagate invalid value flags to cells that depend on invalid values. In Java, though there is no overflow interrupt or notification, there is a good chance you will eventually find out about an overflow error when you see a java.lang.Double.POSITIVE_INFINITY, java.lang.Double.NEGATIVE_INFINITY or java.lang.Double.NaN showing up in one of your double variables. You can’t use == to test for NaN , you must use java.lang.Double.isNan().

BigDecimal Comparison

==, BigDecimal.equals and BigDecimal.compareTo() == 0 all give different results.

Override vs Shadow

What happens when you reuse a method or variable name in a subclass? It depends. There are four cases to consider:
  1. static method
  2. instance method
  3. static variable
  4. instance variable
Do you inherit the superclass version or get subclass version? This is all so confusing, I suggest you perform some experiments. Here a little program I wrote to discover the various shadowing and overriding behaviours: My general advice is never to shadow variables. There is no need for it. It just causes confusion. In summary:

broken setLocation, setSize, setBackground, setForeground

People often complain they can’t get setLocation, setSize, setBounds, setBackground or setForeground to work. The problem is usually that something else is setting them and overriding your settings: Culprits include:
  1. Layout Managers. They do resize() and move() (the deprecated method names) on the contents of each container. Only the null layout manager will leave your sizes intact.
  2. Generated code in Visual Cafe will do a move() and show() (the deprecated names) in an overridden show() method.
  3. Your own code using deprecated names like move() or resize().

Unsigned Bytes

Back when the earth was still molten, when characters still had only 7 bits, somebody thought it would be a good idea if characters were signed. This caused a schism in the C world when 8-bit characters later appeared. Java added unsigned 16-bit Unicode characters, but decided to support only signed 8-bit characters, known as bytes. Perhaps Java’s designers wanted to encourage migration to Unicode by making handling unsigned bytes awkward. In any case, you most often want unsigned 8-bit characters, not signed.

int i1 = b2 & 0xff;
byte b2 = (byte)( b2 + 1 );
byte b3 = b2;

New Comparable

You cannot say:

new Comparable()

since Comparable is only an interface. The run time needs a specific class to construct an Object. An interface does not have a constructor.

However, you can say:

new Comparable[10]

All that gets constructed is an block of 10 null pointers. No Objects with the Comparable interface are constructed.

However, you cannot say:

new Comparable<String>[10]

Because of the cheesy way Java implemented generics, they are incompatible with arrays. The excuse is it has no way to record the generic information associated with array.

Modulus

In Java you take the remainder with the % operator. In Java, the sign of the remainder follows the dividend, not the divisor. Java division has the Euclidean property. When you multiply the quotient by the divisor and add the remainder you get back to the dividend. Java division is truncateddivision.

Floored division is what you normally want when trying to figure out which bin an item belongs in. You can

For computing how many fixed-size bins you need to contain N items, you want ceiled division, also known as the covered quotient. You can compute the covered quotient as:

Inconsistent Signs
Signs Division Modulus
+ + +7/+4=+1 +7%+4=+3
- + -7/+4=-1 -7%+4=-3
+ - +7/-4=-1 +7%-4=+3
- - -7/-4=+1 -7%-4=-3
I have a general rule to avoid writing code that depends on the expected sign of the modulus. It is often a source of bugs since people testing have their own ideas of how the answers should be. For example the Microsoft JIT (Just In Time) gives wrong signs even for division, but the interpreter gives correct ones.

Static Initialisers

You have to enclose any initialisation code for static (class) variables inside a sandwich like this:
static { calcPriceTab();}
Newbies just stick such code anywhere inside the class { } sandwich and are baffled by the misleading error messages.

The order of your variables that are statically initialised matters. Consider this little program:

The output with Java 1.4.1 was no compile error and 61 0 61, YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary)

The order of those three static finals is crucial to the results! You must put them in the order you want the calculations done. Java is not smart like a spreadsheet to do natural order recalcs for you. It will notice and either handle or reject such forward references when only literals and simple variables are involved, but as soon as you do things inside methods, it throws up its hands and says on your own head be it.

Instance Initialisers

You have the option of initialising an instance variable in:
  1. the declaration
  2. the constructor
  3. an instance initialiser block

The advantage of putting it on the declaration is that you need to specify it only once, not once for each constructor. This means there is less likelihood of error if its value is ever changed. The other safe approach is to put all your initialisation code in one method or one constructor and have all the constructors call it.

Constructor Initialisation

The order that fields are initialised is subtle.
constructor for details

However, there is one particularly tricky problem with initialisation order. In general you must avoid calling any non-final methods in a constructor. The problem is that instance initialisers / variable initialisation in the derived class is performed after the constructor of the base class. This can cause a problem if the base class constructor calls a method polymorphically, since that method will be presuming its derived class fields have all been initialised when they have not.

So base class constructors can safely call private or final methods of the base class provided those methods directly or indirectly call only private or final methods of the base class. If you call methods in your constructor polymorphically, the compiler will not stop or warn you of the initialisation pitfalls awaiting.

Casts

Java is a strongly typed language. You not only need to be aware of what type each of your variables were declared, you must also keep track of the type of object each is currently pointing to, which may be a subclass of the declared class.

There are four sorts of cast:

  1. widening

    byte b = -42;
    int i = (int)b;
    This cast is nugatory, though you might want to use the cast as a documentation aid. It does some conversion work — sign extension.
  2. narrowing

    int i = -16411;
    byte b = (byte)i;

    This style of cast actually may do some real conversion work — zeroing out high order bits.

  3. to superclass

    Dog myDog = (Dog)aDalmatian;
    This cast is nugatory, though you might want to use the case as a documentation aid. All Dalmatians automatically have all the Dog fields, so this cast has no run-time overhead.
  4. to subclass

    Dalmatian myDalmatian = (Dalmatian)aDog;
    At run time, this cast actually checks that aDog truly is already a Dalmatian, and raises a ClassCastException if it does not. It does not make any attempt to convert a Dog to a Dalmatian.
  5. Casts with abstract classes and interfaces work the same way as classes.
So where are the gotchas?

Implicit Casts

Conversions and promotions occur both when you explicitly request them and sometimes automatically.
  1. Automatic Assignment Conversion converts an expression’s type to a variable’s type (ex. short value = 26). This type of conversion is allowed when converting from a type to that same type (identity conversion), when performing a widening conversion, or when performing a narrowing conversion which assigns an int to a byte, short, or char variable where the int is representable by the (byte, short, or char) variable. Note that this form of conversion occurs only in assignments that preclude exceptions by definition.
  2. Automatic Numeric Promotion homogenates operands to allow an operation (ex. 1.0f + 2.0 will cause 1.0f to be promoted to a double).
  3. Automatic Method Invocation Conversion occurs when passing arguments during a method invocation (ex. calling methodA(45) on a method defined as methodA(long value)). Except for disallowing implicit narrowing of integer constants, this form of conversion’s behavior is identical to that of automatic assignment conversion. Note that this form of conversion occurs only when the argument types passed to the method can be automatically converted to those specified in the method signature in a manner which precludes exceptions by definition.
  4. Automatic String Conversion allows any type to be converted to type String. This occurs when the + String concatenating operator is used (ex. String resultString = the answer is: + result, where result can be of any type)

Concatenation

Java uses the + operator to mean both addition and concatenation. Parsers can unambiguously figure out which your intent is from the context, but humans can be easily fooled. For example:

out.println(" x+y " + x+y );
out.println( x+y + " x+y " );

Which + are addition? Which are concatenation?

The way you most commonly get caught is code like this where the last + is treated as concatenation.

out.println( "value: " + v + 1 );

The concatenation operator has the magic power of being able to implicitly coerce an int into a String by automatically invoking the
static String Integer. toString(int)
method, however, oddly, you can’t do the same thing explicitly with a (String) cast.

out.println( 'A' );
out.println( 'A' + 'B' );
You might naïvely expect: A AB, or perhaps 65 131, however, the answer is: A 131.

The problem is Java’s design blunder of using + to mean both addition and concatenation. Addition also promotes to int, which println displays differently from char.

I really want this fixed. Concatenation should get a new operator symbol and using + for concatenation should be deprecated. The current scheme leads to code too easy to misread. + with int can mean either addition or concatenation. Deciding which depends too much on subtle context clues.

addChangeListener

The symptoms of this gotcha are getting two ChangeEvents triggered where you would expect only one, or using removeChangeListener and events continue to arrive. The catch is you must call addChangeListener only once. If you call it twice with the same delegate, you will set up two Listeners each receiving a copy of each ChangeEvent. addChangeListener adds a second ChangeListener even if it is already added. Similarly, removeChangeListener just removes the first matching ChangeListener it finds, not the duplicates too. This applies to all types of Listener.

M y O u t p u t L o o k s L i k e T h i s

There are 10 common character handling types in Java

Ten Character Handling Types
Type mutable? size in bits signed? Description
String immutable 16 unsigned Unicode
StringBuffer Mutable both in value and size 16 unsigned Unicode
StringBuilder Mutable both in value and size. Faster than StringBuffer, but only available in  Java version 1.5 or later 16 unsigned Unicode
FastCat Mutable both in value and size. Faster than StringBuilder when concatenating Strings rather than characters. Easier to estimate the size. 16 unsigned Unicode
char mutable value 16 unsigned individual Unicode character.
Character immutable 16 unsigned Unicode character object.
char[] mutable value 16 unsigned array of Unicode characters.
byte mutable value 8 signed individual ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) char.
Byte immutable 8 signed ASCII char object.
byte[] mutable value 8 signed array of ASCII chars.
UTF (Unicode Transformation unit) immutable 8/16 unsigned 16-bit length, 7-bit chars, multibyte codes for 16-bit chars with high bit on.
Especially when you are doing I/O. you need to be very clear whether you have 8 or 16-bit characters internally and 8 or 16-bit characters externally. Some I/O methods convert, some do not. A hex file viewer will help you track down such problems. An ASCII character when converted to Unicode has a high order 0 byte prepended, since all Java I/O is big-endian.

Finalizers Are Not Destructors

C++ programmers tend to think that the finalize() method is equivalent to a destructor. This is not true, for two reasons:
  1. There is no guarantee that a finalizer will ever be called.
  2. Finalizers do not automatically propagate up the inheritance chain like destructors. In particular, you should manually call super.finalize() from all your finalize methods. There is no guarantee about the order of invocation of finalizers.
There are two System methods you should be aware of:
  1. System.runFinalization() Runs the finalization methods of any objects pending finalization.
  2. System.runFinalizersOnExit(Boolean value) Deprecated. It causes all finalizer methods to be invoked before exiting. This method is inherently unsafe. It may result in finalizers being called on live objects while other threads are concurrently manipulating those objects, resulting in erratic behavior or deadlock.

Finally

Finally can be confusing. The finally keyword is Java’s answer to C++ destructors. In C++, when automatic objects go out of scope (even as a result of a thrown exception), the objects’ destructors are called in a well-defined order. Java has garbage collection and no destructors, so there needs to be some way to ensure that certain things happen before exiting the scope. finally lets you achieve this, but if you put certain kinds of statements in finally blocks, you can confuse yourself. The following

Also, the behavior of exceptions thrown from within finally blocks is not obvious.

Thread Safety

Thread safety is underspecified, in particular:
  1. Implications of finalization on concurrent programs. In the Sun VM, there is a garbage collection thread that is responsible for freeing unreferenced objects and calling their finalizers. If your finalizer calls synchronized methods, you can wind up with very hard to debug deadlocks.
  2. Should the implementation of method clone() from interface Cloneable be thread safe or not?
  3. A rule of thumb is: never assume that JDK (Java Development Kit) objects are thread safe. Do not think, "Oh, I bet I can guess the implementation and it must be thread safe." For example, java.util.SimpleDateFormat is not thread safe, so things like this will cause strange formatting errors

  4. Swing components are not thread-safe. You must use javax.swing.SwingUtilities.invokeLater()/invokeAndWait() or EventQueue. invokeLater. in any code which might possibly be called by a thread other than the main event-dispatching thread. This crops up frequently in writing custom ListModels and TreeModels which respond to non-local or non-GUI events.
  5. java.util.Hashtable and java.util.Vector are two examples of JDK objects whose every method is synchronized. This imposes a large runtime cost on applications that iterate over these structures. When you are not using threads, prefer java.util.HashMap and java.util.ArrayList respectively. If you are using  Java version 1.6 or later, it may pay to cannibalise the Hashtable code and remove the synchronisation.
  6. Thread.sleep(5000) is supposed to sleep for 5 seconds. However, if somebody changes the system time, you may sleep for a very long time or no time at all. The OS (Operating System) records the wake up time in absolute form, not relative.
  7. Thread scheduling is not guaranteed to be round-robin. A task may totally hog the CPU (Central Processing Unit) at the expense of threads of the same priority. You can use Thread.yield() to have a conscience. You can use Thread.setPriority(Thread.NORM_PRIORITY-1) to lower a thread’s priority. In Applets you need security clearance to even lower thread priority.

lemon java.math.BigDecimal

BigDecimal provides for immutable arbitrary-precision signed decimal numbers. A BigDecimal consists of an arbitrary precision integer unscaled value (a BigInteger 2-two’s complement variable length array of bytes) and a non-negative 32-bit integer scale, which represents the number of digits to the right of the decimal point.

For greater efficiency, you can often use a long or int and keep track of the scaling yourself and inserting a decorative decimal point on output.

BigDecimal is a travesty and deserves raspberries just like Date. Briefly, it is slow, it is difficult to use, it uses native methods and it quietly drops off significant digits during conversion.

Also, java.text.DecimalFormat. parse returns either a Long or a Double. There is no built-in way to define custom number formatting for BigDecimalor BigInteger objects.

Fortunately, IBM has made available its proposed replacement for Oracle’s class, which is 23 times faster, smaller, uses no native methods and implements standard ANSI (American National Standards Institute) X3.274 floating arithmetic. For the spec see: IBM’s Decimal Arithmetic For Java and AlphaWorks. Dirk Bosmans has implemented the IBM spec as ArciMath. Another implementation is PSPDec.

java.awt.Graphics.drawRect

java.awt.Graphics.drawRect( int x, int y , int width , int height )

draws a rectangle one pixel bigger than the specified width and height. I am told if you understand the abstract drawing model the AWT (Advanced Windowing Toolkit) uses, it turns out this extra pixel is deliberate and unavoidable. The rationale is that you specify the path of an idealised box drawn with infinitely thin lines and the pen hangs down and to the right, at least one pixel thick.

java.awt.Graphics.drawString

All graphics routines expect x,y to represent the upper left corner of a bounding box. However, for Graphics.drawString() x,y refers to the to the baseline (which is distinct yet again from the lower left corner). This inconsistency is traditional in drawing packages. You need to

g.drawString( "Hello World" , 0, getFontMetrics(getFont()).getAscent() );

GridBagLayout

Whenever you use any layout manager, other than null, it is going to decide the sizes and placement of the components. Your setLocation(), setBounds() and setSize() calls will all be overridden. Some ways you can get finer control are: GridBagLayout sometimes behaves strangely, generating oddly asymmetric layouts. The problem can usually be traced to trying to put two components into the same grid cell. You won’t get any error message when you do this.

GridBagLayout will generate goofy layouts when components provide incorrect numbers for minimum and preferred size. For example TextFields don’t take into consideration setColumns or the size of the current font. All you can do is fudge using the ipadx and ipady parameters to inflate the minimum size.

GridBayLayout does not mind if you have a row or column with nothing in it. It will take no space. You might consider leaving some empty rows and columns in your layouts for future expansion.

weightx and weighty control where the extra space goes if the container is expanded. Think of them as percentages that don’t have to add up to 100%. They are automatically normalised. To figure out which column should get the most space, GridBagLayout examines each component in the column and looks at its weightx. It saves the biggest weightx of all the components in that column as the weight for the entire column. It does not average them, or add them. Then it proportionately assigns the extra space based on the column weights. The component with a lot of weight does not necessarily grow, just the column that component is in. Giving equal but non-zero weight to columns tends to equalize their size.

GridBagLayout does the same thing allocating extra space to rows by using weighty.

The Insets(top, left, bottom, right) can be used to build a border around a component. The four numbers are measured in pixels.

If you want to fix the size of some element, you must use all three methods: setMinimumSize, setMaxiumSize and setPreferredSize.

Make sure you supply some non-zero x and y weights in your GridBag. Otherwise when you squeeze the frame down too small the components will act as if they had infinite space and will scoot madly offscreen to the right.

If you use GridBagConstraints.BOTH, forcing fill, that will override any setMaximumSize you may have specified on your panel.

Null Layout

It is possible to handle layout manually with a null layout manager. To do absolute positioning, in theory all you need to do is Container.setLayout( null ) and the position your components with Component.setLocation( x, y ). However, when you do this, you often find yourself looking at a blank screen. Here are some things to check. Oddly, it may be simpler to write your own custom LayoutManager to do your positioning. The advantages of writing a custom layout are: For a simple LayoutManager or LayoutManager2, many of the methods can be dummies.

Deprecation Blues

With  Java version 1.6 or later, Sun brought more order to the naming of various methods, particularly in the AWT . The old names are still supported but deprecated (discouraged from use pending complete removal). Deprecated names are not aliases the compiler translates to the new names. They are full fledged methods in their own right. I wondered why vendors like Sun and Symantec were so reluctant to abandon the old names entirely and convert completely to the new scheme. I have discovered why.

setVisible() calls the deprecated show(), the reverse of that you might expect. You would think the deprecated method should bear the speed penalty of another layer of indirection. Yet consider what happens if you write a new setVisible() method to override one of the built-in ones. Users of the original show() method will be unaffected. They will continue to use the old code. Only those who directly call setVisible() will use your new routine. Now, consider what happens if you write a new deprecated show() method to override one of the built-in ones. All works properly; everyone will use your new method. You are thus stuck writing new deprecated methods if you want your code to work properly.

Let us say the AWT were redesigned so that instead show() called setVisible(). Then old code that used the deprecated methods would suddenly stop working.

This problem is general and applies to all deprecated methods. Let us hope Sun will soon get rid of the deprecated methods entirely, then this problem will go away. Most of the deprecated names are just name changes to fit the JavaBeans get/set conventions. Such deprecations could be handled as pure aliases by translation to the new names inside the compiler and do away with the old classes entirely. However, that would cause a political problem of JDK 1.0.2 code no longer running under Java version 1.6 or later without recompilation or some translation process. You could not then have code that would run both under JDK 1.02 and 1.1. We would need to support the translation process in the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) to have old code automatically use the new names. Sun is very reluctant to make any changes to the JVM .

The JDK 1.0.2 event handling routines are also deprecated. It is quite a bit bigger job to convert those. They could not be handled by a simple alias.

java.io.BufferedReader & BufferedInputStream

int BufferedInputStream.read( byte[] m, int offset, int len )
is advertised to block until some input is available. It returns the number of bytes read, or -1 for EOF (End Of File). You might erroneouslypresume that it blocks either: Not so. You might get as little as one-byte back, even when you are nowhere near the EOF. len just controls the maximum amount you are prepared to accept.
int BufferedReader.read ( char[] m, int offset, int len )
has a similar gotcha. You must use java.io.DataInputStream.readFully if you want to get all the bytes you asked for.

The read routine has another problem. It traps and ignores IOExceptions rather than passing them on to you. To get around both the above problems, you can use your own read routine like this:

For more elaborate code to deal with the problem download the com.mindprod.http package and download the com.mindprod.filetransfer package. You can also view some of the code at the http entry.

Applets Can’t Use The Local Hard Disk

The whole idea of an Applet is to protect the user from you putting any files or meddling with any files on his hard disk, so you are going to have to cheat if you want your Applet to be able to write or read his local hard disk. Here are seven possibilities:
  1. Give the user a new security manager that has to be installed specially that gives permission to just your Applet to write to disk. Unfortunately, this won’t work if anybody else does the same thing. Security managers are still a black art. I have not yet seen any documentation on just how you would do this.
  2. Convert your Applet to an application. The user has to download and install it, find and install some sort of standalone Java system for his platform, then run it. Whew!
  3. Write a native class to cheat and do the I/O behind the security manager’s back. You will need to write such a native class for each different platform, then arrange to have it installed separately ahead of time. Ouch! Even then you still need security clearance to run the native class.
  4. Use JavaScript or Active-X or some other gonzo scheme that cares not a fig for security.
  5. Join the ranks of other programmers with their torches and pitchforks demanding some sort of chimera — half Applet/half application. It would be allowed access to a limited amount of disk space and would not have access to any files it did not create. It could run inside a browser. This would have general applicability. You could do offline data entry for example then upload, or retain application preference information, cache server data,…
  6. Using the preferences of Internet Explorer, if you list an application’s site as a "Trusted Site, then if you set the security zone for Trusted Sites to Custom" and change the settings such that Java permissions are Unrestricted and "Launch applications and files" is enabled, whew!, you will be able to write/read files from the local hard drive from within an Applet.
  7. Lobby for a generic user-configurable security manager, that lets users OK various naughty behaviours from specific Applets. The Applet would have an interface to request permission for special dispensation with minimum and ideal requirements.

Reconstituted Serialized Objects

The process of serialization and reconstituting objects is fraught with problems. What could you do to ensure transient fields in reconstituted objects are properly initialised?

Broken Repaint

A very common beginner’s problem is failure of repaint() to redraw the screen. repaint() works by putting an object in a queue to remind the system to schedule the paint() later. It will never get around to servicing the queue if you don’t quickly return from your init method, or handling the keystroke or button press event. Calling Thread.sleep() just makes matters worse, since the current thread is the one that will have to later do the paint().

Hidden Components Won’t Stay Hidden

setEnabled( false ) disables a component by graying it out. setVisible( false ) (a.k.a hide()) makes the component totally disappear, with an invalidate(), which marks all containing components as needing a repack(), so that surrounding components will be shuffled to grow into the space it vacates. setVisible( true ) (a.k.a. show()) also marks visible all contained subcomponents. This means a component you have hidden will infuriatingly unhide itself the next time you setVisible( true ) the enclosing window. This is fixed in JDK1.1+.

I know of no method that will let you hide a component, that does not invalidate, thus leaving its space reserved, with no shuffling of sibling components.

Dialog.setBackground Does Not Work

The Dialog background gets reset when the dialog is being prepared for display, so your call to setBackground (or setForeground) in the constructor won’t have an

public void addNotify()
   {
   super.addNotify();
   setBackground( Color.red );
   }
Add notify creates the peer object. You are hooking your code in right after the peer gets created.

You also need to explicitly control the background of each component. Inheriting it from the Dialog will just give gray.

One further warning. In JDK 1.0, the modal feature of dialogs does not work.

Socket To Me

The Socket() constructor doesn’t allow you to specify a timeout. The default of 1.5 minutes is usually quite excessive.

Until nio, there was no select() like functionality in sockets (or to be more flexible, in InputStreams) and there was no timeout in the InputStream.read() method. This makes it impossible to program a Socket server having a number of threads less than the number of users. However, I am told that if you use the available() method cleverly you can fudge it.

You have some control over timeouts with the networking system properties.

Learning More


JSP (Java Server Pages) Import Blues

The problem is in the include mechanism used by Tomcat 4.0.3 and possibly other JSP server products. The language uses a <%@page import=package.package.class %> notation to import classes.

If you use an include for boilerplate headers and footers then you may get a ClassNotFoundException if the included JSP uses a custom class.

ASP (Active Server Page) developers are used to source code being dropped in by the ASP preprocessor and interpreted as one big file. According to this logic an import statement would be expected to appear at the top of the page, where most ppl declare variables and define functions are in ASP . However, in JSP, things tend to be split up and stay split up into many small files. You must thus make sure the import goes in each file that uses it, not just at the beginning.

Misleading Error Messages

A compiler looks at source code from quite a different perspective that humans do. You gradually get to know what your compiler really means when it says baffling things like { expected.

See the table of error messages, now a separate document.

Credits

As you might guess, a great many people helped compile this list. I have only recently started giving credit. If you would like to be added to this list, please tell me.

Unfortunately, the email addresses below are not clickable. Further, you cannot copy/paste them into your email program. You must manually re-type them. The email addresses are graphic *.png images created by Masker. I inconvenience you this way to discourage spammers from harvesting email addresses from the website with automated website spidering.

Contributors
Tov Are email Tov Are
Paul van Keep email Paul van Keep
Mike Cowlishaw email Mike Cowlishaw
Pierre Baillargeon email Pierre Baillargeon
Bill Wilkinson email Bill Wilkinson
Patricia Shanahan email Patricia Shanahan
Joseph Bowbeer email Joseph Bowbeer
Charles Thomas email Charles Thomas
Joel Crisp email Joel Crisp
Eric Nagler email Eric Nagler
Daniel Leuck email Daniel Leuck
William Brogden email William Brogden
Yves Bossu email Yves Bossu
Chad Loder email Chad Loder
Savas Alparslan email Savas Alparslan
Simon Gibbs email Simon Gibbs
Laurence Vanhelsuwé email Laurence Vanhelsuwé
Norman Paterson email Norman Paterson
Jonathan Finn email Jonathan Finn

Books

book cover recommend book⇒Java ™ Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls and Corner Casesto book home
by Joshua J. Bloch, Neal Gafter 978-0-321-33678-1 paperback
birth 1961-08-28 age:56 B001U5VJVS kindle
publisher Addison-Wesley
published 2005-07-04
A set of 95 short programs that give astonishing results. When you understand them, you understand the quirkier features of Java. Bloch wrote much of the JDK class library. He also wrote the Effective Java Programming Language Guide
Australian flag abe books anz abe books.ca Canadian flag
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Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock. Try looking for it with a bookfinder.

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