Sometimes, to discover what a class does, you see yourself reading several lines of code. And much of these lines are constructors, getters, setters, toString, equals, hashcode, etc. They simply get on your way.
Wouldn´t be great if all those lines just weren´t there?
Lombok is a library that can help you with that. It's great helping you reduce tedious and boilerplate code.
Your class may go from this:
To this:
Lombok instruments the code for you. You can check the class´ methods that were automatically generated with the command:
javap Person.class
And this is how it looks like after the instrumentation made by Lombok:
If your class is a Value Object as described in Martin Fowler´s article, you can use more fine grained annotations as seen in the code below:
Another great feature is the @Builder feature. I recommend it to all who's going to try Lombok.
To use Lombok, you need to put its library in the classpath during the compile time and only during the compile time. At runtime, your class´ bytecode has already been changed.
If you use Maven, you can declare lombok as a provided dependency in your POM file like this:
The installation and a description of the basic functions can be found here. There is also a great video in the frontpage. All of these resources and references are very clear and simple to follow. You´ll be using Lombok in your project in no time.
Just a little warning for Sonar users: it does not like Lombok! It complains that the bytecode lacks getters, setters and such. To help with this, there is a command called delombok that I think that can help making Sonar happy.
Any comment about this post? Please drop a line! I´ll be glad to hear from you!
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