Since I'm working on a server with absolutely no non-persisted state for users, every User-related object we have is rolled out on every request.

Consequently I often find myself doing lazy initialization of properties of objects that may go unused.

protected EventDispatcher dispatcher = new EventDispatcher();

Becomes...

protected EventDispatcher<EventMessage> dispatcher;

public EventDispatcher<EventMessage> getEventDispatcher() {
    if (dispatcher == null) {
        dispatcher = new EventDispatcher<EventMessage>();
    }
    return dispatcher;
}

Is there any reason this couldn't be built into Java?

protected lazy EventDispatcher dispatcher = new EventDispatcher();