Properties, static and yet dynamic

I think it's time to share some more of my Java properties ideas.

Property is a super-type-token and the definition looks like this:

public static final Property<Person,String> name =
            new Property<Person,String> ("name") {};

So I've taken the property out of its usual habitat - the object it applies to, and let it be defined in any class! One prominent flexibility is the ability to add properties to an existing class by loading a new class.

How is the value associated with a particular object instance? A property should be assigned a "definition", which is in essence a Function that retrieves the value from a given object, by using reflection for example. The definition can be changed on the fly, and user of the property needs not be concerned.

That's all very nice, but reflection is not enough if we add properties on the fly. There are 2 ways of dealing with it. The more obvious one is having a Map or an array within the object where the values can be stored. This of course means that the object class is in advance "prepared" to have dynamic properties.

Another way is rather shocking at first glance... to me it was, anyway. Traditionally the object stores a property->value map. But why can't we have the property store an object->value map!? When I read about column-oriented databases, I realized it's not as crazy as it first looks. All I needed was WeakIdentityHashMap, unfortunately JDK does not have one, but google-collections do - the ReferenceMap. Also cloning and serialization need special hooks, but it's not too much hassle.

I have 4 types of properties for now, Property that only allows read access, UpdatableProperty that supports read and write, and their multi-value counterparts: IterableProperty and CollectionProperty. This list can of course be extended. Any property can have a default value, and updatable property can have a list of value constraints. I have a library of definitions - plain function, reflected, mapped, ones using internal and external map like I described above and of course more can be added.

Last but not least - all properties that apply to a certain class of objects are tracked, so there's an API which I can query for applicable properties for a given class. It would collect properties of all super-classes and super-interfaces - note that property can be defined for an interface and in an interface (being a final static).

That's it for tonight. To be continued...

P.S. JavaEdge was really great, thanks Alpha folks!