In this article, we will be assessing whether Java Records could replace the Lombok library entirely. Here’s what we think.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Java for a lot of time has been accused and mocked for its verbosity. Even the most passionate Java developers have to admit that it felt ridiculous to declare a bean class with two attributes. If you follow the right recommendations, you end up adding not only getters and setters, but also the implementations of toString hashcode and equals methods. The final result is a chunk of boilerplate that invites you to start learning another language. Gratefully, libraries like Lombok came to the rescue and reduced the pain in the eyes of a coder. With the new Java Records feature, one may wonder if it’s OK now to retire Lombok library. Let’s do a short analysis. It’s a Java Library highly integrated with development environments that improve (spice) the code via annotations. It’s highly acceptable and used in the Java community. Using Lombok our Car class looks like this: The code is much cleaner and pleasant to the eyes, without losing any functionality from our previous version. A Java record can be shortly described as the implementation of the Value Object pattern. It’s a Java class where all its instances are immutable. Hence, all class attributes need to be passed during object creation.
