You can leverage Apache Commons StringUtils.isEmpty(str), which checks for empty strings and handles null gracefully.

Example:

System.out.println(StringUtils.isEmpty("")); // true
System.out.println(StringUtils.isEmpty(null)); // true

Google Guava also provides a similar, probably easier-to-read method: Strings.isNullOrEmpty(str).

Example:

System.out.println(Strings.isNullOrEmpty("")); // true
System.out.println(Strings.isNullOrEmpty(null)); // true

To detect if a string is null or empty, you can use the following without including any external dependencies on your project and still keeping your code simple/clean:

if(myString==null || myString.isEmpty()){
    //do something
}

or if blank spaces need to be detected as well:

if(myString==null || myString.trim().isEmpty()){
    //do something
}

you could easily wrap these into utility methods to be more concise since these are very common checks to make:

public final class StringUtils{

    private StringUtils() { }   

    public static bool isNullOrEmpty(string s){
        if(s==null || s.isEmpty()){
            return true;
        }
        return false;
    }

    public static bool isNullOrWhiteSpace(string s){
        if(s==null || s.trim().isEmpty()){
            return true;
        }
        return false;
    }
}

and then call these methods via:

if(StringUtils.isNullOrEmpty(myString)){...}

and

if(StringUtils.isNullOrWhiteSpace(myString)){...}

Use org.apache.commons.lang.StringUtils

I like to use Apache commons-lang for these kinds of things, and especially the StringUtils utility class:

import org.apache.commons.lang.StringUtils;

if (StringUtils.isNotBlank(str)) {
    ...
} 

if (StringUtils.isBlank(str)) {
    ...
} 

"null" is not the same as null.

"null" is a string 4 characters in length of the word "null".

null (no quotes) is just that--nothing.