Properties for Java

The need for better support for properties in Java has been raised many times and in several contexts, and I am definitely not going to repeat the reasoning here. It used to be on the list of features proposed for Java 7, and here's the last time I read about it on Rémi Forax's blog (quite a while ago). Fred recently blogged about another way of addressing the problem via abstract Enums. There were several other interesting proposals, and the main trends are summarized very nicely by Stephen Colebourne here. Stephen is also the one who first blogged about bean-independent property object and wrote a reference implementation - Joda Beans project. I had started developing similar ideas in parallel, and since I have now reached a stage of a nice working prototype, this is what I hope to describe in the upcoming posts.

First of all, I chose the bean-independent property approach (although it was before Stephen coined it that), because I think the real added value in properties is being able to refer to the property regardless of any particular object instance. Another big design decision is to avoid changing Java compiler, unlike Fred and Rémi. I mean it's a very interesting exercise to play with javac and I am really grateful that Sun made it possible, but... IMO that's the last resort to solve the problem. I mean, even in the best case where the enhancement is accepted by Sun, the earliest time when it will work in an official Java version is Java 7, which is still very far away. And using a home-made javac in production environment is just not very realistic, I mean imagine justifying it to your boss (or customer). I also tried to stay away from bytecode or source generation, and managed well so far, although I might need to use it in the future in order to improve verbosity and safety of my solution.

So here is what I managed to do: no compiler changes, fully type-safe properties, some null-safety built in (ideas similar to what Stephen blogged here), the properties can have annotations and can be referred to in annotations, they can be applied to existing Java Beans via reflection and they expose their own meta-data via reflection. In addition to all that some Ruby-esque adding/modifying properties on the fly is supported. The last, but not least, is that I have been using google-collections quite a lot in this project so there's very nice inter-operation, for example Property implements com.google.common.base.Function and writing pseudo-functional code in Java using google-collections and fluent interfaces has been discussed quite a lot recently.

So this is the blog-post number 0, sort of preface, that hopefully will keep you interested enough to come back and read the blog. To be continued...