[sakai2-tcc] Discuss: should we be using lombok in Sakai?

[Aaron Zeckoski]

lombok was released in 2009 and is not even at a 0.2 yet. Also, there
is clearly debate about it in the java community:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3852091/is-it-safe-to-use-project-lombok
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2866084/is-project-lombok-suitable-for-large-java-projects

Should we be using this in Sakai?
I have seen multiple new developers to Sakai confused by it. I
understand using eclipse to generated getters takes a few clicks and
makes the code a little longer but I don't think that is all that
hard.
Lombok saves a few lines of code but at the expense of requiring
special eclipse (or other IDE) configuration, extra maven build, and
special developer knowledge of what is happening (so they know why
they don't see any get and set methods like... 99% of java projects.
It also completely breaks compile time code scanning (around anything
it affects anyway) but
that is a lesser concern.
If we decide to use it broadly as a community, I think it needs to be
clearly documented and indicated as a requirement. If not, I think we
should delombok the current handful of places it is used.

I added this to the CLE team call as a discussion point for this week:
http://etherpad.ctools.org/rmmt-2013-08-15

-AZ


-- 
Aaron Zeckoski - Software Architect - http://tinyurl.com/azprofile