Is there a destructor for Java?

Question

Is there a destructor for Java? I don\'t seem to be able to find any documentation on this. If there isn\'t, how can I achieve the same effect?

To make my question m

Answer 1

Use of finalize() methods should be avoided. They are not a reliable mechanism for resource clean up and it is possible to cause problems in the garbage collector by abusing them.

If you require a deallocation call in your object, say to release resources, use an explicit method call. This convention can be seen in existing APIs (e.g. Closeable, Graphics.dispose(), Widget.dispose()) and is usually called via try/finally.

Resource r = new Resource();
try {
    //work
} finally {
    r.dispose();
}

Attempts to use a disposed object should throw a runtime exception (see IllegalStateException).

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EDIT:

I was thinking, if all I did was just to dereference the data and wait for the garbage collector to collect them, wouldn't there be a memory leak if my user repeatedly entered data and pressed the reset button?

Generally, all you need to do is dereference the objects - at least, this is the way it is supposed to work. If you are worried about garbage collection, check out Java SE 6 HotSpot[tm] Virtual Machine Garbage Collection Tuning (or the equivalent document for your JVM version).