As you may have guessed from my previous comment, I hate it when people write "foo".equals(bar). This kind of a clever trick is an accident waiting to happen un

As you may have guessed from my previous comment, I hate it when people write "foo".equals(bar). This kind of a clever trick is an accident waiting to happen unless you're really, really ok with null being a valid value for bar (and more often than not, you're not ok with that). If null is not a valid value for bar, then it's better to catch it and deal with it as early as possible.