The IT industry today is sodden with TLAs like SOA, ESB… and FLAs like AJAX, SOAP and JUNK. i was thinking about refreshing myself with some fundamentals again. Blogging about a basic concept may not be cool, but refreshing – don’t you think? I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that i am digressing too much. Ok, lets cut to the chase.

One of the best practices i follow religiously is to use final modifiers for method arguments where applicable. This is “supposedly” a best-practice written by somebody somewhere. Regardless of whether it is documented as a best-practice or not it is an important concept to understand and use. I have 2 valid reasons to use them for my method arguments.

First, final variables cannot be modified. Come on, everybody knows that. Maybe, but its use is significantly enhanced when it is a method argument and more importantly when you are in a big team environment.

Lets assume that a method takes List as its argument. Typically, the intention of that method is to work with the List – add to it, remove elements from it, use its elements in some way, sort it and what not. Consequently when the method returns, the caller can investigate the passed List and work with the modifications the callee introduced. But the caller will be on for a big surprise if the callee changes the instance that reference points to itself.

We know that java uses “Pass by copy of reference”. If the callee points the received reference to a different List and then modifies this List, the caller will not be able to see any change at all. This is because the copy of the reference held by the caller still points to the same old List. More often than not this is done by mistake and is not intentional. If such a behavior is intentional, final modifier is not required. In all other cases since this leads to bugs in code, it is a good practice to use final modifier for method arguments.

Second, if the method uses the infamous anonymous inner-class syntax to do something, and that inner class wants to use the methods arguments, java requires those arguments to be declared final. This is more of a rule than a valid reason.

Are there more valid reasons? I will be glad to receive information from you guys.