Generate the Boilerplate code using Lombok

All the time while doing the programming we do the same thing again and again.The same code is been added by us or we use eclispe to generate the same code. This code is called as boilerplate code. Its the time to get rid of such things. There is a magic available for the same which is called as lombok. Yes, its lombok library which helps you to remove the boilerplate code and also provides some others features. If Lombok is added to your project classpath, you can can easily get rid of all the getters & setters methods, class constructors(argument constructor, no argument constructor), hashcode and equals methods and many more by just adding couple of annotations the class. For more details and other feature please refer https://projectlombok.org/features/all. The guys have created a very nice thing.

I will list down all the annotation provided by the lombok and will see some them with the examples.

@Getter/@Setter : It will generate the getter and setter methods of the class fields. All the methods genearated are by default public. You can set the access level for any field.

@NonNull : Can be used for the parameters of a methos or a constructors for null check. It can be applied to a field as well.

@NoArgsConstructor : It generates constructor with no parameters.

@RequiredArgsConstructor : It generates a constructor with one parameter of each field where it requires special handling.

@AllArgsConstructor : It generates a constructor with 1 parameter for each field in your class.

@ToString : It provides the implementation of toString method to your class where it will print the classs name and the fields of the class.

@EqualsAndHashCode : Same as toString , Lombok provides the implemenation of the equals and hashCode method. It will consider the non-static and non-transient fields. You can also incluse or exclude the fields explicitely @EqualsAndHashCode.Include or @EqualsAndHashCode.Exclude.

@Data : Its combo provided by lombok for some the commonly used annotation. Its combo of
@ToString, @EqualsAndHashCode, @Getter / @Setter and @RequiredArgsConstructor. It covers all of the above in one shot.

Here is an example where I have created a java class named Employee.java
I have added the member as empId,firstName,lastName,address
On the right side, in the outline window you can find all the code generated by lombok.

I have created the object of Employee class and shown how to use the implementation provided by lombok. In this case I have used the toString and equals method.