There are some points to be considered when looking at garbage collection in Java with Chameleon objects. It is not guaranteed that the Java interpreter will invoke the finalize() method of any given Java object.

This represents something of a design issue for Chameleon's java classes. We overcame it by using the following approach. The Table class and the ChameleonDateTime class have release() methods which can be explicitly called if the finalize() method is not called.

The structure of the classes was designed such that the release() method is normally invoked automatically without you needing to think about it. Except for some special cases which are described next, this is not an issue you need to worry about.

The release() method can be called multiple times without any problems. However, once released, other methods on the object should not be called.