On 5 Jan 2012, at 4:05 AM, Steve Ebersole wrote:
Probably you can cache it by AnnotationInstance, so maybe something
like this instead:
class AnnotationProxyBuilder {
private final Map annotationProxyMap = new ...;
public <T> T getAnnotationProxy(final AnnotationInstance
annotationInstance, final Class<T> annotationClass) {
T annotationProxy = (T) annotationProxyMap.get(
annotationInstance );
if ( annotationProxy == null ) {
annotationProxy = buildAnnotationProxy( annotationInstance,
annotationClass );
annotationProxyMap.put( annotationInstance, annotationProxy
);
}
return annotationProxy;
}
private <T> T buildAnnotationProxy(final AnnotationInstance
annotationInstance, final Class<T> annotationClass) {
// as before...
}
}
Is it really worth caching by annotation instance? Are we in most cases not
processing/visiting the instance once?
That said, I kind of like the proxy approach. It makes the code more compact (less if
statements) and by using java.lang.Annotation
we get some type safety back (annotation.foo() instead of
annotationInstance.value("foo")). The drawback of course is the
additional proxy overhead. I can see this idea as an evolution of the JandexHelper and
would add it in there.
Maybe Envers can lead the way and we can see how this approach turns out. Given that there
is so much other stuff
still left to do on the metamodel side itself I don't think we should start
retrofitting right now. There are other more important things to
do.
--Hardy