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What’s Not Coming in Mustang


By Allen Holub
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April 15, 2005 —  (Page 1 of 2)
Java’s next “Mustang” (Java 6) release has finally entered the JSR process (JSR 270: www.jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=270). This column is the first of several that will look at the proposed changes.

Rather than providing an integrated approach to the new release, Mustang is just a collection of 11 existing JSRs, each with its own expert group. These groups are essentially autonomous. The reality is that there’s no overall architecture, and more to the point, there’s no architect coordinating the Mustang work.

This lack of guidance is a significant problem. Here’s an example.

I talked recently about my concerns with Sun’s documentation for the annotation-processing tool (apt) that ships with Java 5. The apt APIs aren’t even part of Java; they’re in a com.sun package. JSR 269 (part of Mustang) defines a Pluggable Annotation Processing API, and will presumably fix this last problem. JSR 269 will probably break your existing code, though; it “is targeting the same general functionality as the apt tool...[but] it is expected the API included in this JSR will resemble but not necessarily be compatible with the existing apt API.”

It gets worse: “Users of apt have identified several limitations to the API; this feedback should be considered by the expert group.” Note the phrase “should be considered,” not “will be incorporated into the standard.”

Even if JSR 269 miraculously does improve the quality of the API, it doesn’t solve the real problem: apt is a kludge. To effectively perform compile-time annotation-processing, you need hooks into the compiler itself, not a preprocessor that mimics a compiler by giving you partial access to a limited set of syntactic elements. As it stands, apt can’t be used to actually modify the behavior of the compiler.

Consider an @property attribute, used to simplify a class that will be used in a program that requires the existing JavaBeans-style getter/setter idiom. The compiler should automatically generate get/set functions for you when it sees an @property applied to some field. The best you can do with apt, however, is create a brand-new java-source-code file for a class that wraps the one you’re actually processing, and then compile that file externally. The wrapper class must have a different class name than the class you wrote, and it won’t integrate cleanly with your program. As it stands, apt just doesn’t do the job.




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