Does 'extends Object' have a purpose or is it redundant?

Question

Following a tutorial on the internet regarding Soap development with Java, I found this link, with a rather unusual code for myself.

The code:

public         


        

Answer 1

It is legal but useless boilerplate. Everything extends Object so the language spec allows you to leave it out, and it generally should be left out (some writers of coding standards disagree).

The situation is the same in generics (extends Object is implicit and redundant), it is just that for some reason (I have seen some claim early buggy Generics implementations had issues with the ? wildcard) it has caught on a bit more there.