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Programmers often incorrectly assume that declaring a field or variable final makes the referenced object immutable. Declaring variables that have a primitive type final does prevent changes to their values after initialization (by normal Java processing). However, when the field has a reference type, declaring the field final only makes the reference itself immutable. The final clause has no effect on the referenced object. According to The Java Language Specification, §4.12.4, "final Variables" [JLS 20132015],
If a
finalvariable holds a reference to an object, then the state of the object may be changed by operations on the object, but the variable will always refer to the same object.
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Item 13, "Minimize the Accessibility of Classes and Members" | |
| [Conventions 2009] | |
Chapter 6, "Interfaces and Inner Classes" | |
Section 2.2, "Public Fields" | |
Class Properties for Security Review in an Object-Capability Subset of Java |
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