Black magic, or code generation? hard choice... :)
I think I'll try the black magic, let's see how it goes :)


On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 8:16 PM, Igor Vaynberg <[email protected]>wrote:

> On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 12:37 PM, tetsuo <[email protected]> wrote:
> > -1000!
> >
> > This will be horrible! Even with the current API, most generics I have to
> > declare in my code don't add anything to type safety. For example:
>
> while i am also not a fan of having component generified i do believe
> the example below is a bit contrived.
>
> first, i hope most people do not use PropertyModels because they are
> not compile-time-safe. there are plenty of project that implement
> compile-time-safe models, personally i prefer
> https://github.com/42Lines/metagen to using proxy-based solutions.
>
> further, i hope even less people use compound property models. they
> are even more unsafe then property models and make your code even more
> fragile. i would hate to refactor code that uses CPMs.
>
> >    add(new Form<Person>("form", new CompoundPropertyModel<Person>(new
> > PropertyModel<Person>(this, "person")))
> >       .add(new TextField<String>("name"))
> >       .add(new TextField<Integer>("age"))
> >       .add(new TextField<Double>("salary"))
> >       .add(new Button("save", new PropertyModel<Person>(this,"person")){
> >          public void onSubmit() {
> >             repository.save((Person)getForm().getDefaultModelObject());
> >          }
> >       });
> >
> > In my experience, this kind of code is fairly common in Wicket
> > applications. Every form component must be declared with a type, but none
> > has *any* kind of type safety gain.
>
> but how often do you declare a form component without adding any
> validators to it? the generic type of component also makes sure you
> add the correct validator. for example it wont let you add a validator
> that expects strings to a component that produces integers.
>
> also, not sure why you are replicating the model in Button. first, the
> Button uses its model to fill its label; secondly, in real code the
> model would be in a final var or field that things like onsubmit can
> access easily.
>
> -igor
>
>
> >
> > - The property model uses reflection, so its type can't be verified by
> the
> > compiler (this.person could be anything, not just a Person).
> > - Generics will guarantee that the form model will be of type Person, but
> > since it's all declared inline, and the real model isn't verifiable, it
> > just adds lots of verbosity without any real gain.
> > - Most form components use the implicit model, that also uses reflection,
> > and also can't verify the actual type of the underlying property, at
> > compilation time. Even in runtime, *the type information is lost due
> erasure
> > *, so it can't use it to do any additional verification.
> > *- Worse, you can even declare the "name" TextField as <Integer> or
> > <Double> (while maintaining the 'text' attribute as String), and since
> > there is no type information at runtime, it doesn't matter. It won't even
> > throw an exception (it will just work normally).* In this case, the type
> > declaration is simply a lie.
> >
> > Just pain, no gain. In my code, I sometimes just add a @SuppressWarnings(
> > "rawtypes") to the class, and remove all useless generic type
> declarations.
> > If everything will be required to declare them, I will have do it more
> > frequently.
> >
> > That said, repeater components benefit greatly from generics. So do
> custom
> > models, validators, and converters. Or the rare cases that we explicitly
> > declare the form component model. But forcing everything to be
> > generic-typed will just make Wicket extremely verbose to use, with very
> > little benefit.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 4:00 AM, Martin Grigorov <[email protected]
> >wrote:
> >
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I just pushed some initial work for [1] and [2] in
> >> branch generified-component-4930.
> >>
> >> So far it doesn't look nice.
> >>
> >> The added generics break somehow setMetaData/getMetaData methods - you
> can
> >> see compilation errors in Component and Page classes. I think it is
> caused
> >> by the anonymous instance of MetaDataKey ( new MetaDataKey<T>(type) {}
> ).
> >>
> >> Also the visit*** methods do not compile at the moment, but even if we
> find
> >> a way to fix their signature I think writing a visitor will become quite
> >> cumbersome.
> >> At the moment we have IVisitor
> >> and org.apache.wicket.util.iterator.AbstractHierarchyIterator which do
> the
> >> same job. The Iterator API is supposed to be simpler to write for the
> >> users. Maybe we can drop  IVisitor ... ?!
> >>
> >> I'd like to ask for help with this task. It is supposed to be the
> biggest
> >> API break for Wicket 7.0. My current feeling is that the end result
> won't
> >> be very pleasant for the user-land code.
> >> For example the application code will have to do something like:
> >>
> >>   WebMarkupContainer<Void> wmc = new WebMarkupContainer<>("id")
> >>
> >> It is not that much but we have to decide whether we want it.
> >> But first let's try to fix the compilation problems.
> >>
> >>
> >> 1. https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/WICKET-4930 (Add generics to
> >> o.a.w.Component)
> >> 2.
> >>
> >>
> https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/WICKET/Wicket+7.0+Roadmap#Wicket7.0Roadmap-Genericsfororg.apache.wicket.Component
> >>
>

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