I like the approach of customizing behavior through builder methods that return immutable instances. Here's how Guava Splitter uses it:

private static final Splitter MY_SPLITTER = Splitter.on(',')
       .trimResults()
       .omitEmptyStrings();

MY_SPLITTER.split("one,,,,  two,three");

The benefits of this are:

• Superior readibility
• Clear separation of configuration vs. action methods
• Promotes cohesion by forcing you to think about what the object is, what it should and shouldn't do. In this case it's a Splitter. You'd never put someVaguelyStringRelatedOperation(List<Entity> myEntities) in a class called Splitter, but you'd think about putting it as a static method in a StringUtils class.
• The instances are pre-configured therefore readily dependency-injectable. The client doesn't need to worry about whether to pass true or false to a method to get the correct behavior.

I like the approach of customizing behavior through builder methods that return immutable instances. Here's how Guava Splitter uses it:

private static final Splitter MY_SPLITTER = Splitter.on(',')
       .trimResults()
       .omitEmptyStrings();

MY_SPLITTER.split("one,,,,  two,three");

The benefits of this are:

• Superior readibility
• Clear separation of configuration vs. action methods
• Promotes cohesion by forcing you to think about what the object is, what it should and shouldn't do. In this case it's a Splitter. You'd never put someVaguelyStringRelatedOperation(List<Entity> myEntities) in a class called Splitter, but you'd think about putting it as a static method in a StringUtils class.
• The instances are pre-configured therefore readily dependency-injectable. The client doesn't need to worry about whether to pass true or false to a method to get the correct behavior.