Immutable class is good for caching purpose because you don’t need to worry about the value changes. Other benefit of immutable class is that it is inherently thread-safe, so you don’t need to worry about thread safety in case of multi-threaded environment.
Here I am providing a way to create immutable class in java via an example for better understanding.
To create immutable class in java, you have to do following steps.
- Declare the class as final so it can’t be extended.
- Make all fields private so that direct access is not allowed.
- Don’t provide setter methods for variables
- Make all mutable fields final so that it’s value can be assigned only once.
- Initialize all the fields via a constructor performing deep copy.
- Perform cloning of objects in the getter methods to return a copy rather than returning the actual object reference.