David O'Meara wrote:As a side note, make sure methods called from constructors are private otherwise things can fail horribly if they get overridden.
Private, static, or final, yes. Any of these will prevent overriding.
Stephan van Hulst wrote:Even better, declare your class final.
Unless of course you actually need it to be extensible. While extends may be often overused, it's still perfectly valid sometimes.