write(this); //not that

Saw this little gem in some code recently:

 if (someString != null
   && !someString.equalsIgnoreCase("")
   && !someString.equalsIgnoreCase(" ")) { ... }

Although the author of this code was lax in checking for cases where someString had more than one space, he/she was mindful enough to check for those pesky capitalized spaces.

Seriously folks, Apache Commons Lang (http://commons.apache.org/) has a lot of great stuff ready-made for these commons problems. Just check out StringUtils.isNotBlank() for a better, more complete, and more readable solution:

 if (StringUtils.isNotBlank(someString)) { ... }

Using static imports, this reads even nicer:

if (isNotBlank(someString)) { ... }