Project lombok, interesting bean shortcuts with the annotation processor

I came across a mention of project lombok recently whilst looking for something else. It is a combination of annotations and annotation processors to make bean programming more declarative. For the purposes of this blog I am going to use a quick example using the @Data annotation. So for this simple class the attention of the @Data annotation will at compile time add in getters/settings equals/hashCode and a nice toString implementation.

import lombok.Data;

@Data
public class DataExample {
  
  
   private String name;
   private double score;
   private String tags[];
  
}

Now lombok has integration with Eclipse and javac, since we are using JDeveloper I am stuck with the latter. In theory all you need to do is to make sure that JDeveloper compiles with "javac" with the lombok.jar on your classpath. It turns out that at least in the more recent versions of JDeveloper we use the compiler API directly which doesn't appear to properly invoke the annotation processors in the library. (Look under lombok.jar!/META-INF/services to see how this is wired up) The trick is to configure JDeveloper to run javac "out of process":

Now before you compile JDeveloper might complain that it can't find any of the new methods; but as soon as the classpath is populated even code insight works correctly (although not inside of the DataElement class):

Using the above data you can see how the toString() method is puts together some nice tidy output:

DataExample(name=Bob, score=4.0, tags=[Fun, Tall])

I wonder if the ADF team could use something similar to reduce the amount of boilerplate code that they have to generate. Also with a little bit of work you could get far cleaner JAXB and EJB artifacts. It would also be good if this project was extended to support bound attributes transparently and perhaps create a builder which always takes far too much time in my book.