Everybody agree about the fact that Java is verbose but yet a great language that is widly used over the industry. The version 8 introduced a lot of stuff that helps developers reduce de verbosity of their code.

Project Lombok

When i start a Java project, the first dependency i take is Lombok. It helps me in so many ways when i am writing my code that it became frustrating to me when i can’t find it on the classpath of the project i am working on.

@Log (@CommonLog/@Slf4j/@Log4j/…)

This simple annotation replaces the long line that i keep forgetting :

private static final org.apache.commons.logging.Log log =
org.apache.commons.logging.LogFactory.getLog(LogExample.class);

documentation

Accessors, Equals and HashCode (@Getter/@Setter)

Lombok can also generate getters, setters, equals and hascode methods :

import lombok.EqualsAndHashCode;
import lombok.Getter;
import lombok.Setter;

@Getter @Setter @EqualsAndHashCode
public class Person {
    private String firstName;
    private String lastName;
    private int age;
    private String email;
}

Lombok can be configured to generate chainable (returning this) and fluent accessors so we can write :

Person homer = new Person()
	            	.firstName("Homer")
                	.lastName("Simpson")
                	.age(39)
                	.email("hsimpson@burns-corp.com");

documentation

@Builder

If instead of/in addition to the fluent and chainable accessors a Builder is need (useful when all the properties are final… Immutability ) Lombok provides a @Builder annotation that generates a builder so we can use :

Person homer = Person.builder()
                .firstName("Homer")
                .lastName("Simpson")
                .age(39)
                .email("hsimpson@burns-corp.com")
                .build();                

documentation

val/var

I don’t use these features everywhere but sometimes they can be useful. val avoids writing the type of a variable by inferring it. It also declares the variable as final

import lombok.val;
//...
val homer = new Person().firstName("Homer").lastName("Simpson");

var works exactly like val, except the local variable is not declared as final.

documentation : val var

More

Lombok offers a lot more feature that may be useful:

@Data : a shortcut for @ToString, @EqualsAndHashCode, @Getter and @Setter

Constructors : @NoArgsConstructor, @RequiredArgsConstructor and @AllArgsConstructor

Lombok can be configured using a simple config file lombok.config

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