Lombok

I'll give you an overview of Lombok, including how it works, what it's best used for, and a quick list of its current pros and cons.

On the whole, these problems can be worked around, and with time most of them will probably be resolved by the Lombok and Eclipse dev teams.

Lombok allows you to enter a parenthetical parameter for that purpose.

At the time of this writing, however, Eclipse provides the smoothest code-editing experience when used with Lombok.

If you decide to use Lombok, there's a chance that you might want to extend it to generate your own boilerplate code.

Lombok generates most common Java boilerplate code, including getters, setters, equals, and hashCode, just to name a few.

At first, it looked like Lombok Timur was the exception, as it was not on lowland.

In my opinion, any Lombok extension needs to support both javac and ECJ, at least for now.

Lombok also provides less-verbose means of synchronizing methods.

Before adding Lombok to your toolbox, definitely consider its pros and cons, and determine for yourself if the gains justify the loses.

To demonstrate a Lombok extension, I wrote up a quick sample project that generates JavaBeans plumbing code.

Lombok supports more than one mechanism for triggering code generation, including the very popular Java annotations.

In Lombok, annotations are no longer just metadata: they actually act as commands driving code generation.

Lombok uses annotations to identify classes and blocks of Java code in an effort to eliminate lines of code.

Because there is no Java source for Lombok-generated code, debugging gets a little bit confusing.

Second, certain Lombok transformations do change Java syntax as we know it, in a fundamental way.

As you can see, the Lombok team has documented what blocks of code generate what.

By modifying (or transforming) the AST, Lombok keeps your source code trim and free of bloat, unlike plain-text code-generation.

As I mentioned before, Lombok's annotations could do a better job of communicating that they are more than just metadata.

You may not always want to accept the other defaults Lombok gives you, either.

The included sample code (see Download) extends Lombok to generate JavaBeans boilerplate code.

As I previously mentioned, Lombok currently supports common code patterns, but not all of them are covered, including JavaBeans.

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With Lombok, a . java file no longer shows what's in a . class file.

Lombok uses non-public APIs in both javac and ECJ to accomplish its clever code-generation technique.

Then you might want to try out Project Lombok, which is an open source, code-generation library for the Java platform.

Because your code will be plugging into Lombok, it is very likely that it will need to use similar, if not the same APIs.

For developers who like to look under the hood, Lombok's delombok tool, accessed via the Maven or Ant command line, will be your headlamp.

Code that has been "delombok-ed" will contain all the transformations made previously by Lombok, in plain text.

This article has presented some guidelines regarding when to extend Lombok and described how to do it.

The Lombok team use an improved version of Ivy that they have developed themselves, ivyplusplus (see Resources).

I'll then focus on one of the most powerful, but also complex, use cases for Lombok: extending it for a custom code base.

Delombok takes code already transformed by Lombok and generates plain Java source files from it.

However you end up doing it, you should ultimately see a Lombok installation screen.

The major argument against Lombok is that it performs "too much magic. "

The good news is that the Lombok team has done a fairly good job of documenting how they use javac and ECJ to generate AST nodes.

Other than that, Eclipse's debugger works just as usual when Lombok is present.

Lombok examines your code and doesn't create its own version of getStyle based on the property.

Open a prompt in your operating system, go to the directory where lombok. jar is installed, and type java -jar lombok. jar.

I used Eclipse 3. 6 (Helios) and a snapshot of Lombok's git repository for version 0. 10-BETA2.

If I write the code in Listing 3, Lombok will generate something like the code in Listing 4, using my annotation handlers