How to check if object is null or not except == null

The easiest way to check is entity == null. There is no shorter way to do that.

Note that there is a method for this in the standard lib:

Objects.isNull(Object obj)

And another one which is the opposite of the above one:

Objects.nonNull(Object obj)

And there is yet another one which can be used to force a value to be not null, it throws a NullPointerException otherwise:

T Objects.requireNonNull(T obj);

Note: The Objects class was added in Java 7, but the isNull() and nonNull() methods were added only in Java 8.