Hidden Features of Java

Answer 1

I was surprised by instance initializers the other day. I was deleting some code-folded methods and ended up creating multiple instance initializers :

public class App {
    public App(String name) { System.out.println(name + "'s constructor called"); }

    static { System.out.println("static initializer called"); }

    { System.out.println("instance initializer called"); }

    static { System.out.println("static initializer2 called"); }

    { System.out.println("instance initializer2 called"); }

    public static void main( String[] args ) {
        new App("one");
        new App("two");
  }
}

Executing the main method will display:

static initializer called
static initializer2 called
instance initializer called
instance initializer2 called
one's constructor called
instance initializer called
instance initializer2 called
two's constructor called

I guess these would be useful if you had multiple constructors and needed common code

They also provide syntactic sugar for initializing your classes:

List numbers = new ArrayList(){{ add(1); add(2); }};

Map codes = new HashMap(){{ 
  put("1","one"); 
  put("2","two");
}};