Comments on: Structures in Java

By: James Law

James Law — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 12:24:11 +0000

Akshay,
As a fellow setter eradicator, check out access=field in hibernate…

By: Jean-Marie Dautelle

Jean-Marie Dautelle — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 13:53:30 +0000

C struct/union are intended for memory mapping.
The equivalent capability for Java is currently provided by Javolution Struct/Union classes (http://javolution.org/api/javolution/io/Struct.html)

By: Ricky Clarkson

Ricky Clarkson — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 21:11:00 +0000

‘Dumb’ Getters and setters aren’t needed in internal code, only library code, as IDEs can automatically refactor public fields to private fields with accessors.

Delphi (and C#?) provide properties, which allow you to specify what happens when a ‘variable’ is written to or read from.

Netbeans (not that I run it) has refactoring scripts, which you can give to your clients when you change your library – they run it over their codebase and the IDE applies the refactors to match the change that you made.

Obviously this is of limited use because it doesn’t work on all 3 Java IDEs.

By: Guillaume Laforge

Guillaume Laforge — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 17:51:21 +0000

Even with an IDE, getters and setters are painful, even for your eyes. Groovy decided to make this simpler with auto-generated getters and setters:

class Line {
int width
String color
}

By: n8han

n8han — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 16:26:07 +0000

We need something like ruby’s attr_accessor method. I’ve always hated writing (or generating, or just seeing) brain-dead getters and setters for Java, but I don’t make fields public because 1) people would freak out 2) sometimes you add unanticipated logic to an existing getter or setter.

By: Akshay

Akshay — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 13:00:10 +0000

I am also sick of frameworks like webwork and hibernate which impose the need of getters and setters on an object. In an ideal world a single object domain object should be used across all layers from db to presentation without breaking any encapsulation.

By: Chris Brown

Chris Brown — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 11:58:50 +0000

This is why superior languages like C# have them.