If in a company there're strict (== normal for me) coding rules, scattered magic 0s, 1s, ""s across the code are prohibited, especially people use automatic code reviews or reviews by external code review teams, while constants or enum entries are okay. EMPTY is readable enough (imported from org.apache.commons.lang3.StringUtils.EMPTY) if there is no support for it in JVM languages —
Alexander Petrovskiy 15 secs ago