Nevertheless, I appreciate the inputs collected in this thread. The initial question has been promptly addressed and to avoid further thread-jacking, I now leave the fate of this thread to the mods/admins. Thank you all for your time.

"Utility/helper classes are more often than not a big code smell." - This got me interested into reading about the matter here and here. It seems there's no unanimous take on this with several commenters even attributing it to "oo purism". Seeing the ProgrammersExchange thread was also closed for "possibly soliciting debate/arguments", it appears it's more of an opinionated discussion than a factual one.

I didn't expect this simple question to garner that much attention to be honest (or that code review here is only for production code apparently). Should the admins/moderators see it fit, I don't mind them closing the thread. Thank you.

Is there a limitation to what needs to be reviewed?

Hello, this particular project is not meant to be that complex. It's only barebones for demo purposes.

Hello, Zesar is quite right about "local vars in the method-context". The code is actually inside a Servlet's doPost(). But thank you Adriano as well for the bullet points, I actually liked the second one - makes sense. Upvoted. :)

Hello, yes I'm doing validation. I managed to trim it down to 3 booleans by combining the destination checks (if the destination is blank, it's also invalid anyway). It's much more manageable now. :)