Question

I have to work with an existing application and there is a List which stores all rendered objects in order to remove them later if the gui changes.

This is the List:

private List<Component> registeredComponents = new ArrayList<Component>();

Now I’m wondering if Java only stores references to the objects (ZK components) or if it does store a copy of the objects. The question is if I should remove this.

Answer 1

The list will contain references only. This holds for all types of collections, not only ArrayLists.

In Java there’s actually no way to “get hold of” the object itself. When you create a new object all you get is a reference to it (and there’s no way to “dereference” it by using for instance a * operator as in C++).