@Getter annotation?

November 24, 2007 by Stephan Schmidt

9 Comments Comments Icon

With all the innovation in annotations, see Web Beans or Google Guice, just a saturday morning idea: Why not drop the annoying get* convention and replace it with some annotations? The API wouldn’t be as short, but the usage of a getter looks nicer and more fluent. And of course the IDE could hide the @Getter annotation, just as it hides the imports.

@Getter
public Context context() {
	return context;
}

public Context getContext() {
	return context;
}

You can leave a Reply here. Of course, you should follow me on twitter here.

You can share this post!
Do you want to tell others about this article? Use the social bookmark icons to submit this artice to the service of your choice. Thanks.

About the author: Stephan Schmidt is head of development at brands4friends. He has more than 15 years of internet technology experience and 10 years experience in agile. He was head of development, consultant and CTO and is a speaker, author and blog writer. He specializes in organizing and optimizing software development helping companies by increasing productivity with lean software development and agile methodologies. Want to know more? All views are only his own.

Comments

Laird Nelson

November 24th, 2007

Not entirely sure what you’re looking for, but you can do this with PropertyDescriptors.

stephan

November 24th, 2007

Care to explain?

Michael Nischt

November 25th, 2007

And then we make the parenthesis..
or just use scala ;-)

http://www.scala-lang.org/docu/files/api/scala/reflect/BeanProperty.html
(with val only get* will be produced)

stephan

November 25th, 2007

Or use Groovy ;-) Scala is nice indeed. I don’t think it will get into the mainstream but it might show the way for a Java future (type inference, actors, class matching).

And of course: away with the parenthesis.

Peter Lawrey

November 25th, 2007

Another option, if the getter doesn’t do anything why not have a public final field?

stephan

November 25th, 2007

A final public field makes it hard to change the behavior in the future I guess. Groovy/Scala/Ruby properties would be best. Hope for Java 7.

Carsten Saager

November 26th, 2007

The lowercase getter is already used: It is the accessor to a final field. (See ordinal(), name() in Enum)

When I look at the discussions over Java 7 I am all but sure if I want to use this Java. Luckily there are Scala and C#. I don’t want a Smalltalk Java nor a Google Java (interesting that the Google Collections look horrible now but will look nice as soon as the Google suggestions will make it into the language)

Jim

November 26th, 2007

Quite a lot of discussion about this for Java 7:
http://tech.puredanger.com/java7#property

stephan

November 26th, 2007

@Carsten, @Jim: Yes, I’m following the discussion with much interest. Let’s hope Java gets better property handling with Java 7. Perhaps even something Javascript like (which is beautiful in it’s simplicity), combining properties with BCGA:

   myclass.setX = {int x => this.x = x}
   myclass.x = 3

What people wrote somewhere else:

Additional comments powered by BackType

Guide to CodeMonkeyism

Over the last 4 years I wrote many articles on this blog. To make it easier for you to find the relevant ones, I've organized them into topics.

Code Monkeyism Copyright 2007 , content and design by Stephan Schmidt. Monkey is from the Tango Project and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. Icons from FamFamFam, images from Flickr and iStockPhoto. The newsletter subscription text is from Joel on Software because it was perfect. Social Network Icon Pack by Komodo Media, Rogie King is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.komodomedia.com

@Getter annotation?

Comments

Leave a Reply

Guide to CodeMonkeyism

Top 10

Java Developer

NoSQL Guy

Startup/CTO

Job Seeker

Agilist

Free subscriptions