Best way to check that element is not present using Selenium WebDriver with java

i usually couple of methods (in pair) for verification whether element is present or not:

public boolean isElementPresent(By locatorKey) {
    try {
        driver.findElement(locatorKey);
        return true;
    } catch (org.openqa.selenium.NoSuchElementException e) {
        return false;
    }
}

public boolean isElementVisible(String cssLocator){
    return driver.findElement(By.cssSelector(cssLocator)).isDisplayed();
}

Note that sometimes selenium can find elements in DOM but they can be invisible, consequently selenium will not be able to interact with them. So in this case method checking for visibility helps.

If you want to wait for the element until it appears the best solution i found is to use fluent wait:

public WebElement fluentWait(final By locator){
    Wait<WebDriver> wait = new FluentWait<WebDriver>(driver)
            .withTimeout(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS)
            .pollingEvery(5, TimeUnit.SECONDS)
            .ignoring(NoSuchElementException.class);

    WebElement foo = wait.until(new Function<WebDriver, WebElement>() {
        public WebElement apply(WebDriver driver) {
            return driver.findElement(locator);
        }
    });

    return foo;
};

Hope this helps)

Instead of doing findElement, do findElements and check the length of the returned elements is 0. This is how I'm doing using WebdriverJS and I expect the same will work in Java