Rewriting the initialization to be more meaningful for clueless reader that does not need to understand every detail

extracting the accessor initialization outside of the API block of the Item class

Wrong English in method name

ljnelson noted at 'http://weblogs.java.net/blog/jst/archive/2008/10/the_better_comp.html' that it is enough to make the variable final and the problem goes away. True, final helps, however the same code without final works as well. This very likely means that the compiler puts the variable into the topmost block where it is guaranteed to be fully initialized. That is why we need a hint warn about declaration of non-fully initialized variables.

Too long lines

Renaming the class and adding code snippet boundaries

Showing compiler optimization impact on behaviour of garbage collector

Fork to ensure -ea is applied

Moving to org.apidesign packages

Enabling assertions and also demonstrating that fields can be moved up to one level in the class hierarchy