ds-bean

The Doctusoft Bean framework provides a basis for the techniques we liked to use at Doctusoft Ltd, related to Java Beans (entities, DTOs or whatever). It's best used with lombok-ds, a fork of lombok-pg to help us generate some boilerplate code. Check out the Wiki for more information

##Main features

• Bean Property Literals
• Bean Method Literals
• Value Binding support

Property Literals

Property literals can help you create frameworks that can reflect bean properties in a type-safe way. The Hibernate Criteria API is a good example for that need, but our Value Binding support also relies on this feature.

Usage

You can declare attribute literals with lombok-ds:

public class SomeClass {
    @Attribute @Getter @Setter
    private String someProperty;
}

The code above will create an

public static final Attribute<SomeClass, String> _someProperty;

on the class. The Attribute interface provides the following methods:

public interface Attribute<E, T> {
	T getValue( E instance );
	void setValue( E instance, T value );
	Class<E> getParent();
	Class<T> getType();
	String getName();
}

Lombok-ds will implement this interface inline for each attribute. This works the fastest during runtime, and it also works with GWT.

If you can't use lombok-ds for some reason, you can manually create these literals using the AttributeImpl class in ds-bean-reflected - this relies on reflection, so it's a bit slower and works only in a JVM, not in GWT.

##Value Binding Value binding relies on attribute literals described above. It's under the ds-bean-binding project. The TestValueBindingBuilder provides simple examples of creating and using value bindings.

###Basic usage examples

Bindings.on(model)
    .get(MyModel._task)
    .get(MyTask._assignee)
    .get(MyAssignee._name);

Conversion:

Bindings.on(model)
    .get(MyModel._task)
    .get(MyTask._dueDate)
    .convert(new BasicDateConverter())

You can easily wrap and use the generic ValueBinding interface to provide bindings in the environment you are using (we are using it with JSF, Vaadin and GWT applications). We will soon release some example wrappers.