Craig, thanks for the feedback and I'm glad to see you're reading the blog!  That's an excellent point you noted concerning the byte code and the initialization occurring during the constructor - which is something I didn't realize and until now, have ever ran into any problems because of it.  Just to verify what you stated about the constructor is correct, I decompiled the Child class using cavaj and got the following (and as you can see, you were right on the mark):

---

class Child extends Parent
{

    private String varA;

    public Child()
    {
        varA = null;
    }

    public String getVarAValue()
    {
        return varA;
    }

    protected void setVarAValue()
    {
        varA = "a value";
    }
}

---

One clarification however concerning my statements: I was not trying to say that I believed this behavior was a bug in the Java language and that it violated any Java specs.  My point (to borrow Matt's phrasing) was its not intuitive behavior - which is inconsistent with the mostly intuitive Java language.  I'm not saying you can't write confusing Java code because you can; however, generally speaking, Java is more intuitive than other languages (or maybe I'm just biased because it's the language I like the most?).

Mr. PMD (aka Matt Harrah), very good point on the class design and I will definitely look into re-orging the method calls - there shouldn't be functionality affected as all that's really needed is an extra method in the Parent class like initialize().

Thanks for the feedback!