Hibernate query.list() method is returning empty list instead of null value

Solution 1:

The reason is not to force null checks in client code, in consistency with Effective Java 2nd Edition, Item 43: Return empty arrays or collections, not nulls.

This makes the client code simpler and less error-prone (and most likely the method implementation as well).

The null-return idiom is likely a holdover from the C programming language, in which array lengths are returned separately from actual arrays. In C, there is no advantage to allocating an array if zero is returned as the length.

Solution 2:

It is consistant: a list is returned with all results, whether there are any or not.