@Getter annotation?

November 24, 2007 by Stephan Schmidt

10 Comments

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;
}

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Stephan Schmidt has been working with internet technologies for the last 20 years. 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. You can find him on Google +

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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

AndrewFink

January 6th, 2011

http://projectlombok.org/ has it and much more ;-)

What people wrote somewhere else:

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