Method and Field Literals

[arjan tijms]

>FWIW, method/field literals would be very useful for POJO-centric libraries
such as JPA/Hibernate, Bean Validation etc.

Absolutely, in fact JPA is now simulating Field Literals by means of
generating a so-called Metamodel for every entity class. See
https://docs.oracle.com/javaee/6/tutorial/doc/gjiup.html#gjivl

In short, given a class:

public class Foo {
    public String bar;
}

JPA generates a class Foo_:

@Static @Metamodel(Foo.class)
public class Foo_ {
    public static volatile SingularAttribute<Foo, String> bar;
}

Everywhere a Field Literal would be actually needed, we then use
Foo_.bar, half telling ourselves that there's the imaginary operator
"_.".

While this works, it's a nasty workaround and for some reason it's
always an issue to generate that Metamodel. Real Field Literals would
make this so much easier.

Kind regards,
Arjan Tijms