In this latest post to his blog Jani Hartikainen looks at creating "null objects" for your applications - a simple tool that lets you replace multiple evaluation checks with a simple object.

How many times have you written code, which checks if a value is null, and then displays something special because of that? Have you written the very same check in more than one place in your code? A null object is an elegant solution to this.

His example shows how to replace a standard User class to grab the user's name with an anonymous user that extends it to return the string "Anonymous User" instead. By creating an intermediate class like this, you can simple call a "getName" and know that there will be some sort of value as the result.