The problem with String concatenation is that it leads to copying of the String object with all the associated cost. StringBuilder is not threadsafe and is therefore faster than StringBuffer, which used to be the preferred choice before Java 5. As a rule of thumb, you should not do String concatenation in a loop, which will be called often. I guess doing a few concatenations here and there will not hurt you as long as you are not talking about hundreds and this of course depends on your performance requirements. If you are doing real time stuff, you should be very careful.
