I've written a sketch which creates a lot of objects in order to draw a stationary frame. Once the drawing is finished, I'd like to dispose of them and free up some memory. How does this work in Java? Can objects have destructors in addition to constructors?

tom's right, you really shouldn't have to worry about it. but sometimes you might end up in a situation when you'll have to help out the garbage collector (GC) a bit and tell it about a significant amount of just released objects. the reason why this is helpful is that normally the GC runs in its own low-priority thread in the background. if you release a lot of memory hungry objects and then quickly need the space again for new ones, you can trigger the GC directly via:

Code:

System.gc(); 

once the method returns, as much memory as possible should be freed up. using this method of course only makes sense if you delete all object references by setting them to null beforehand...