soft and hard references in java

[Piyush Jain]

are there anything called soft and hard references in java?


what are they?

Thanks

[Layne Lund]

I've never heard of this terminology before, but I am far from knowing everything about the language. I hope someone else can confirm (or deny) this

Layne
[ November 03, 2004: Message edited by: Layne Lund ]

[Piyush Jain]

I found it .

there is nothing called hard references.

however SoftReference is a class in the java.lang.ref package.

this resource has good explnation of these references.

softreferences

[Tony Morris]

There are soft, weak, phantom and strong references.
By 'hard reference' I assume you mean 'strong reference'.

Failure to understand these reference types is the cause of many common resource leaks in large applications.