Should Helper/Utility Classes be abstract?

Question

I commonly find myself extracting common behavior out of classes into helper/utility classes that contain nothing but a set of static methods. I\'ve often wondered if I sho

Answer 1

I don't declare utility classes abstract, I declare them final and make the constructor private. That way they can't be subclassed and they can't be instantiated.

public final class Utility
{
    private Utility(){}

    public static void doSomethingUseful()
    {
        ...
    }
}