Method and Field Literals

[Brian Goetz]

Yes, we are aware that there is a contingent out there that would like this a lot.  

Even if we had method and field literals, though, this isn't free -- it's another feature on top of them.  

But we are on board with the goal of reducing the need to program with untyped strings.  

Sent from my iPhone

> On Nov 11, 2014, at 1:55 PM, Gunnar Morling <gunnar at hibernate.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> 2014-11-11 13:03 GMT+01:00 Mario Torre <neugens at redhat.com>:
>> On Tue, 2014-11-11 at 12:28 +0100, Brian Goetz wrote:
>> > Method and field literals came up during lambda.  (As did method
>> > handle literals ). The upshot was that while we did not dislike them,
>> > they were sufficiently distant from the lambda mission that, when the
>> > inevitable need to cut scope made its appearance, they didn't make the
>> > cut. But they are on the list of features to b considered.
>> 
>> Hi Brian,
>> 
>> Very nice to hear that. Do you plan to resume the discussion for 9 or
>> later?
>> 
>> If 9 is the goal, is there a public space where this is being
>> tracked/discussed so we can follow it?
> 
> FWIW, method/field literals would be very useful for POJO-centric libraries such as JPA/Hibernate, Bean Validation etc.
> 
> In several Hibernate projects we have APIs which allow for some sort of "configuration" of bean properties (e.g. to specify constraints in the case of Bean Validation [1]). These APIs are provided as an alternative to annotations for specifying different kinds of meta-data in more dynamic manner. Atm. we use the tuple (property name, element type) for specifying the configured elements. Real literals of course would be much nicer for this and would improve type-safety of such APIs.
> 
> While method/field literals themselves already would be very helpful, being able to specify them within annotation values (similar to class literals today) would add another benefit e.g. for data binding scenarios.
> 
>> Cheers,
>> Mario
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> --Gunnar
> 
> [1] https://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/stable/validator/reference/en-US/html_single/#section-programmatic-api
>  
>