What's the benefit of making a private constructor and a public getInstance method? I understand why you would make the constructor private: to keep someone from instantiating a class.

There is a reason why Java method modifiers exist. If you call public methods internally and don't understand why, your developers could face major class issues.

I wrote about the NetBeans hint "Overridable Method Call in Constructor" in the blog post Seven Indispensable NetBeans Java Hints . In this post, I look at why having an overridable method called ...