Is it a good practice to use Optional as an attribute in a class? [duplicate]

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Java 8’s Optional was mainly intended for return values from methods, and not for properties of Java classes, as described in Optional in Java SE 8:

Of course, people will do what they want. But we did have a clear intention when adding this feature, and it was not to be a general purpose Maybe or Some type, as much as many people would have liked us to do so. Our intention was to provide a limited mechanism for library method return types where there needed to be a clear way to represent “no result”, and using null for such was overwhelmingly likely to cause errors.

The key here is the focus on use as a return type. The class is definitively not intended for use as a property of a Java Bean. Witness to this is that Optional does not implement Serializable, which is generally necessary for widespread use as a property of an object.

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