• NullPointerException

• final var shouldntBeNull = null;
• final var gonnaBlowUp = shouldntBeNull.getFirst().getSecond();

• Null checks everywhere

• var wontBlowUp = null;
• if(null != shouldntBeNull && null != shouldntBeNull.getFirst() && null != shouldntBeNull.getFirst().getSecond()) {
• wontBlowUp = shouldntBeNull.getFirst().getSecond();

• Java 8 introduced a container class inspired by Haskell Maybe and Scala Option[T] 

• Optional<Clazz> will hold an object of type Clazz, or it will just be an empty container if that object is null

• Optional.of()

• Wraps an object into an Optional container

• Optional.ofNullable()

• Allows for processing of objects that can be null
• Also allows for handling null payloads in different ways (more on this later)

• Optional.empty()

• Initialize an Optional container with nobody

• Works seamlessly with any HTML input that is not required:

 @RequestMapping(value = "/combined", method = RequestMethod.GET)

  public String getCombinedThing(

      @RequestParam(value = "thing1", required = true) String thing1,

      @RequestParam(value = "thing2", required = false) Optional<String> thing2) {

    final var response = thing1.concat(thing2.orElse(" but not thing 2"));

    return response;

  }