Blog of Gavin King

Ceylon 1.3.3 is now available

Gavin King
21 August 2017
release news progress 1.3.3

Ceylon 1.3.3 is a significant minor release of the Ceylon language, with over 200 issues closed. This release introduces the restricted annotation, allowing more sophisticated access control, and else case in switch statements, features full support for npm scopes and Maven classifiers, allows static members of interfaces, and freely allows constructor and method overloading in Ceylon code marked native("jvm").

A major goal of this release was to enable improvements to Vert.x's Ceylon language APIs.

This is the last release of Ceylon 1.3. The next release of Ceylon will be 1.4.0, after migration of the project to the Eclipse Foundation.

IDE Changes

Ceylon IDE 1.3.3 for IntelliJ and Eclipse support the most recent releases of the Eclipse and IntelliJ platforms, and Ceylon IDE for Eclipse now features an upgraded icon set optimized for high-density displays.

Ceylon IDE for Eclipse now requires Eclipse Oxygen.

SDK Changes

The Ceylon SDK features the new module ceylon.toml, along with a number of bugfixes and improvements.

Compatibility

This release of Ceylon has been tested with a wide variety of Java libraries and frameworks, including:

Example code demonstrating the use of these frameworks is available.

Migration

  • For the JVM, this release is backwards-compatible with all previous releases of Ceylon since 1.2.0.

  • For JavaScript, this release is backwards-compatible only with releases since 1.2.2.

Ceylon 1.3.3 is backward-compatible with Ceylon 1.3.2, and so it's not necessary to recompile or change dependencies. However, upgrading to version 1.3.3 of any Ceylon platform module is recommended.

About Ceylon

Ceylon is a modern, modular, statically typed programming language for the Java and JavaScript virtual machines. The language features a flexible and very readable syntax, a unique and uncommonly elegant static type system, a powerful module architecture, and excellent tooling, including an awesome IDE supporting both IntelliJ IDEA and the Eclipse platform.

Ceylon enables the development of cross-platform modules that execute portably in both virtual machine environments. Alternatively, a Ceylon module may target one or the other platform, in which case it may interoperate with native code written for that platform.

In the box

This release includes:

  • a complete language specification that defines the syntax and semantics of Ceylon in language accessible to the professional developer,
  • a command line toolset including compilers for Java and JavaScript, a documentation compiler, a test runner, a WAR archive packager, a "fat" JAR packager, and support for executing modular programs on the JVM and Node.js,
  • a powerful module architecture for code organization, dependency management, and module isolation at runtime, which also supports interoperation with OSGi, Jigsaw, Maven, and npm, and
  • the language module, our minimal, cross-platform, foundation-level API.

Available separately:

Language

Ceylon is a highly understandable object-oriented language with static typing. The language features:

  • an emphasis upon readability and a strong bias toward omission or elimination of potentially-harmful or potentially-ambiguous constructs and toward highly disciplined use of static types,
  • an extremely powerful and uncommonly elegant type system combining subtype and parametric polymorphism with:
    • first-class union and intersection types,
    • both declaration-site and use-site variance, and
    • the use of principal types for local type inference and flow-sensitive typing,
  • a unique treatment of function and tuple types, enabling powerful abstractions, along with the most elegant approach to null of any modern language,
  • first-class constructs for defining modules and dependencies between modules,
  • a very flexible syntax including comprehensions and support for expressing tree-like structures,
  • fully-reified generic types, on both the JVM and JavaScript virtual machines, and a unique typesafe metamodel.

More information about these language features may be found in the feature list and quick introduction.

Community

The Ceylon community site, https://ceylon-lang.org, includes documentation, and information about getting involved.

You can follow @ceylonlang on Twitter.

Source code

The source code for Ceylon, its specification, and its website, is freely available from GitHub.

Information about Ceylon's open source licenses is available here.

Issues

Bugs and suggestions may be reported in GitHub's issue tracker.

Acknowledgement

As always, we're deeply grateful to the community volunteers who contributed a substantial part of the current Ceylon codebase, working in their own spare time. The following people have contributed to Ceylon:

Gavin King, Stéphane Épardaud, Tako Schotanus, Tom Bentley, David Festal, Enrique Zamudio, Bastien Jansen, Emmanuel Bernard, Aleš Justin, Tomáš Hradec, James Cobb, Ross Tate, Max Rydahl Andersen, Mladen Turk, Lucas Werkmeister, Roland Tepp, Diego Coronel, Matej Lazar, John Vasileff, Toby Crawley, Julien Viet, Loic Rouchon, Stephane Gallès, Ivo Kasiuk, Corbin Uselton, Paco Soberón, Michael Musgrove, Daniel Rochetti, Henning Burdack, Luke deGruchy, Rohit Mohan, Griffin DeJohn, Casey Dahlin, Gilles Duboscq, Tomasz Krakowiak, Alexander Altman, Alexander Zolotko, Alex Szczuczko, Andrés G. Aragoneses, Anh Nhan Nguyen, Brice Dutheil, Carlos Augusto Mar, Charles Gould, Chris Gregory, klinger, Martin Voelkle, Mr. Arkansas, Paŭlo Ebermann, Vorlent, Akber Choudhry, Renato Athaydes, Flavio Oliveri, Michael Brackx, Brent Douglas, Lukas Eder, Markus Rydh, Julien Ponge, Pete Muir, Nicolas Leroux, Brett Cannon, Geoffrey De Smet, Guillaume Lours, Gunnar Morling, Jeff Parsons, Jesse Sightler, Oleg Kulikov, Raimund Klein, Sergej Koščejev, Chris Marshall, Simon Thum, Maia Kozheva, Shelby, Aslak Knutsen, Fabien Meurisse, Sjur Bakka, Xavier Coulon, Ari Kast, Dan Allen, Deniz Türkoglu, F. Meurisse, Jean-Charles Roger, Johannes Lehmann, allentc, Nikolay Tsankov, Chris Horne, Gabriel Mirea, Georg Ragaller, Harald Wellmann, Oliver Gondža, Stephen Crawley, Byron Clark, Francisco Reverbel, Jonas Berlin, Luke Hutchison, Nikita Ostroumov, Santiago Rodriguez, Sean Flanigan, Schalk W. Cronjé, Colin Bartolome, Arsenii A., Jordi Sola.

Comments

Ceylon 1.3.2 is now available

Gavin King
03 March 2017
release news progress 1.3.2

Ceylon 1.3.2 is a significant minor release of the Ceylon language, with over 100 issues closed. This release introduces Ceylon assemblies, allows you to export Ceylon modules as Maven repositories, makes it even easier than before to have a mixed Java and Ceylon project in Maven, allows string interpolation in assertions, and introduces lazy initialization for attributes.

This release of Ceylon has been tested with a wide variety of Java libraries and frameworks, including:

Example code demonstrating the use of these frameworks is available.

Changes

Enhancements to the language and command-line distribution include:

  • Assemblies (.cas archives)
  • Generate Maven repository
  • Support for mixed Java and Ceylon module projects in Maven
  • String interpolation in assert messages
  • Lazy initialization for attributes marked late

The most notable issues representing those changes are:

  • #6712, #6927, #6929 assembly support — ceylon assemble and .cas archives
  • #6856, #6847 ceylon maven-export to assemble a Maven repo from list of Ceylon modules
  • #6872, #6853, #6875 syntax for specifying maven group/artifact ids and npm module names
  • #3692 string interpolation in assertion failure messages
  • #3544 attribute lazy initialization
  • #6721 allow late attributes in declaration section
  • #6804 much better return type for Iterable.sequence()
  • #6797 named constructors to create Java arrays with streams of elements
  • #6784, #6778 static methods for Integer, Float, and String
  • #2324 add annotations to java.lang for Java modifiers
  • #6735 add --exclude-module option to ceylon copy

Naturally, the release incorporates many more bugfixes and minor enhancements.

IDE Changes

Ceylon IDE 1.3.2 for IntelliJ and Eclipse resolves more than 60 issues, and adds several new features, including support for running as a fat-jar and an improved formatter in IntelliJ.

SDK Changes

Exactly 6 issues affecting the Ceylon SDK have been fixed. New 1.3.2 releases of the platform modules are available in Herd.

Migration

  • For the JVM, this release is backwards-compatible with all previous releases of Ceylon since 1.2.0.

  • For JavaScript, this release is backwards-compatible only with the previous two releases (1.2.2 and 1.3.0).

Ceylon 1.3.2 is backward-compatible with Ceylon 1.3.0, and so it's not necessary to recompile or change dependencies. However, upgrading to version 1.3.2 of any Ceylon platform module is recommended.

About Ceylon

Ceylon is a modern, modular, statically typed programming language for the Java and JavaScript virtual machines. The language features a flexible and very readable syntax, a unique and uncommonly elegant static type system, a powerful module architecture, and excellent tooling, including an awesome IDE supporting both IntelliJ IDEA and the Eclipse platform.

Ceylon enables the development of cross-platform modules that execute portably in both virtual machine environments. Alternatively, a Ceylon module may target one or the other platform, in which case it may interoperate with native code written for that platform.

In the box

This release includes:

  • a complete language specification that defines the syntax and semantics of Ceylon in language accessible to the professional developer,
  • a command line toolset including compilers for Java and JavaScript, a documentation compiler, a test runner, a WAR archive packager, a "fat" JAR packager, and support for executing modular programs on the JVM and Node.js,
  • a powerful module architecture for code organization, dependency management, and module isolation at runtime, which also supports interoperation with OSGi, Jigsaw, Maven, and npm, and
  • the language module, our minimal, cross-platform, foundation-level API.

Available separately:

Language

Ceylon is a highly understandable object-oriented language with static typing. The language features:

  • an emphasis upon readability and a strong bias toward omission or elimination of potentially-harmful or potentially-ambiguous constructs and toward highly disciplined use of static types,
  • an extremely powerful and uncommonly elegant type system combining subtype and parametric polymorphism with:
    • first-class union and intersection types,
    • both declaration-site and use-site variance, and
    • the use of principal types for local type inference and flow-sensitive typing,
  • a unique treatment of function and tuple types, enabling powerful abstractions, along with the most elegant approach to null of any modern language,
  • first-class constructs for defining modules and dependencies between modules,
  • a very flexible syntax including comprehensions and support for expressing tree-like structures,
  • fully-reified generic types, on both the JVM and JavaScript virtual machines, and a unique typesafe metamodel.

More information about these language features may be found in the feature list and quick introduction.

Community

The Ceylon community site, https://ceylon-lang.org, includes documentation, and information about getting involved.

You can follow @ceylonlang on Twitter.

Source code

The source code for Ceylon, its specification, and its website, is freely available from GitHub.

Information about Ceylon's open source licenses is available here.

Issues

Bugs and suggestions may be reported in GitHub's issue tracker.

Acknowledgement

As always, we're deeply grateful to the community volunteers who contributed a substantial part of the current Ceylon codebase, working in their own spare time. The following people have contributed to Ceylon:

Gavin King, Stéphane Épardaud, Tako Schotanus, Tom Bentley, David Festal, Enrique Zamudio, Bastien Jansen, Emmanuel Bernard, Aleš Justin, Tomáš Hradec, James Cobb, Ross Tate, Max Rydahl Andersen, Mladen Turk, Lucas Werkmeister, Roland Tepp, Diego Coronel, Matej Lazar, John Vasileff, Toby Crawley, Julien Viet, Loic Rouchon, Stephane Gallès, Ivo Kasiuk, Corbin Uselton, Paco Soberón, Michael Musgrove, Daniel Rochetti, Henning Burdack, Luke deGruchy, Rohit Mohan, Griffin DeJohn, Casey Dahlin, Gilles Duboscq, Tomasz Krakowiak, Alexander Altman, Alexander Zolotko, Alex Szczuczko, Andrés G. Aragoneses, Anh Nhan Nguyen, Brice Dutheil, Carlos Augusto Mar, Charles Gould, Chris Gregory, klinger, Martin Voelkle, Mr. Arkansas, Paŭlo Ebermann, Vorlent, Akber Choudhry, Renato Athaydes, Flavio Oliveri, Michael Brackx, Brent Douglas, Lukas Eder, Markus Rydh, Julien Ponge, Pete Muir, Nicolas Leroux, Brett Cannon, Geoffrey De Smet, Guillaume Lours, Gunnar Morling, Jeff Parsons, Jesse Sightler, Oleg Kulikov, Raimund Klein, Sergej Koščejev, Chris Marshall, Simon Thum, Maia Kozheva, Shelby, Aslak Knutsen, Fabien Meurisse, Sjur Bakka, Xavier Coulon, Ari Kast, Dan Allen, Deniz Türkoglu, F. Meurisse, Jean-Charles Roger, Johannes Lehmann, allentc, Nikolay Tsankov, Chris Horne, Gabriel Mirea, Georg Ragaller, Harald Wellmann, Oliver Gondža, Stephen Crawley, Byron Clark, Francisco Reverbel, Jonas Berlin, Luke Hutchison, Nikita Ostroumov, Santiago Rodriguez, Sean Flanigan, Schalk W. Cronjé.

Comments

Ceylon 1.3.1 is now available

Gavin King
22 November 2016
release news progress 1.3.1

Ceylon 1.3.1 is a significant minor release of the Ceylon language, with over 140 issues closed. This is the first release of Ceylon which supports interoperation with Java 8 lambdas and streams, with RxJava, and with Spring Boot. This release also introduces support for static members.

This release of Ceylon has been tested with a wide variety of Java libraries and frameworks, including:

Example code demonstrating the use of these frameworks is available.

Compared to previous releases of Ceylon, the use of Java frameworks based on reflection is now much more transparent, and integration with multi-module Maven-based platforms and frameworks is now much easier to configure.

The Ceylon tour has been extensively updated, especially the sections addressing interoperation with native Java and JavaScript, and with the module system.

Changes

Enhancements to the language and command-line distribution include:

  • static members in Ceylon classes
  • interoperation with Java 8 lambdas—ability to pass Ceylon functions to Java SAM types
  • local import statements
  • support for spread operators * and *. with java.lang.Iterable and Java arrays
  • literal tuples in cases of a switch
  • small Characters
  • new Maven interop mode --fully-export-maven-dependencies for projects depending on multi-module platforms like Spring Boot
  • support for POM-only Maven artifacts
  • new Java EE-friendly compiler mode, making it easy to use Java frameworks that depend on reflective direct access to fields
  • ability to pass Ceylon metamodel to Java methods accepting java.lang.Class
  • ability to pass Ceylon strings to Java methods accepting java.lang.CharSequence
  • improved treatment of null values originating in calls to native Java
  • several bugfixes to relating to interop with overloaded Java methods
  • new command line options: --java, --incremental, and --include-dependencies

Naturally, the release incorporates many more bugfixes and minor enhancements.

IDE Changes

Ceylon IDE 1.3.1 for IntelliJ and Eclipse resolves more than 110 issues, and adds support for running and debugging Ceylon programs on WildFly Swarm.

SDK Changes

Exactly 15 issues affecting the Ceylon SDK have been fixed, and the new platform modules ceylon.interop.spring and ceylon.interop.persistence were introduced. New 1.3.1 releases of the platform modules are available in Herd.

Migration

  • For the JVM, this release is backwards-compatible with all previous releases of Ceylon since 1.2.0.

  • For JavaScript, this release is backwards-compatible only with the previous two releases (1.2.2 and 1.3.0).

Ceylon 1.3.1 is backward-compatible with Ceylon 1.3.0, and so it's not necessary to recompile or change dependencies. However, upgrading to version 1.3.1 of any Ceylon platform module is recommended.

About Ceylon

Ceylon is a modern, modular, statically typed programming language for the Java and JavaScript virtual machines. The language features a flexible and very readable syntax, a unique and uncommonly elegant static type system, a powerful module architecture, and excellent tooling, including an awesome IDE supporting both IntelliJ IDEA and the Eclipse platform.

Ceylon enables the development of cross-platform modules that execute portably in both virtual machine environments. Alternatively, a Ceylon module may target one or the other platform, in which case it may interoperate with native code written for that platform.

In the box

This release includes:

  • a complete language specification that defines the syntax and semantics of Ceylon in language accessible to the professional developer,
  • a command line toolset including compilers for Java and JavaScript, a documentation compiler, a test runner, a WAR archive packager, a "fat" JAR packager, and support for executing modular programs on the JVM and Node.js,
  • a powerful module architecture for code organization, dependency management, and module isolation at runtime, which also supports interoperation with OSGi, Jigsaw, Maven, and npm, and
  • the language module, our minimal, cross-platform, foundation-level API.

Available separately:

Language

Ceylon is a highly understandable object-oriented language with static typing. The language features:

  • an emphasis upon readability and a strong bias toward omission or elimination of potentially-harmful or potentially-ambiguous constructs and toward highly disciplined use of static types,
  • an extremely powerful and uncommonly elegant type system combining subtype and parametric polymorphism with:
    • first-class union and intersection types,
    • both declaration-site and use-site variance, and
    • the use of principal types for local type inference and flow-sensitive typing,
  • a unique treatment of function and tuple types, enabling powerful abstractions, along with the most elegant approach to null of any modern language,
  • first-class constructs for defining modules and dependencies between modules,
  • a very flexible syntax including comprehensions and support for expressing tree-like structures,
  • fully-reified generic types, on both the JVM and JavaScript virtual machines, and a unique typesafe metamodel.

More information about these language features may be found in the feature list and quick introduction.

Community

The Ceylon community site, https://ceylon-lang.org, includes documentation, and information about getting involved.

You can follow @ceylonlang on Twitter.

Source code

The source code for Ceylon, its specification, and its website, is freely available from GitHub.

Information about Ceylon's open source licenses is available here.

Issues

Bugs and suggestions may be reported in GitHub's issue tracker.

Acknowledgement

As always, we're deeply grateful to the community volunteers who contributed a substantial part of the current Ceylon codebase, working in their own spare time. The following people have contributed to Ceylon:

Gavin King, Stéphane Épardaud, Tako Schotanus, Tom Bentley, David Festal, Enrique Zamudio, Bastien Jansen, Emmanuel Bernard, Aleš Justin, Tomáš Hradec, James Cobb, Ross Tate, Max Rydahl Andersen, Mladen Turk, Lucas Werkmeister, Roland Tepp, Diego Coronel, Matej Lazar, John Vasileff, Toby Crawley, Julien Viet, Loic Rouchon, Stephane Gallès, Ivo Kasiuk, Corbin Uselton, Paco Soberón, Michael Musgrove, Daniel Rochetti, Henning Burdack, Luke deGruchy, Rohit Mohan, Griffin DeJohn, Casey Dahlin, Gilles Duboscq, Tomasz Krakowiak, Alexander Altman, Alexander Zolotko, Alex Szczuczko, Andrés G. Aragoneses, Anh Nhan Nguyen, Brice Dutheil, Carlos Augusto Mar, Charles Gould, Chris Gregory, klinger, Martin Voelkle, Mr. Arkansas, Paŭlo Ebermann, Vorlent, Akber Choudhry, Renato Athaydes, Flavio Oliveri, Michael Brackx, Brent Douglas, Lukas Eder, Markus Rydh, Julien Ponge, Pete Muir, Nicolas Leroux, Brett Cannon, Geoffrey De Smet, Guillaume Lours, Gunnar Morling, Jeff Parsons, Jesse Sightler, Oleg Kulikov, Raimund Klein, Sergej Koščejev, Chris Marshall, Simon Thum, Maia Kozheva, Shelby, Aslak Knutsen, Fabien Meurisse, Sjur Bakka, Xavier Coulon, Ari Kast, Dan Allen, Deniz Türkoglu, F. Meurisse, Jean-Charles Roger, Johannes Lehmann, allentc, Nikolay Tsankov, Chris Horne, Gabriel Mirea, Georg Ragaller, Harald Wellmann, Oliver Gondža, Stephen Crawley, Byron Clark, Francisco Reverbel, Jonas Berlin, Luke Hutchison, Nikita Ostroumov, Santiago Rodriguez, Sean Flanigan, Schalk W. Cronjé.

Comments

Ceylon 1.3.0 is now available

Gavin King
19 September 2016
release news progress 1.3.0

Ceylon 1.3.0 is a major release of the Ceylon language, with over 330 issues closed. This is the first release of Ceylon which supports Android development, the Node Package Manager (npm), and Wildfly Swarm.

  • For the JVM, this release is backwards-compatible with all releases of Ceylon 1.2 (1.2.0 to 1.2.2).

  • For JavaScript, this release is backwards-compatible only with the previous release (1.2.2).

Ceylon IDE 1.3.0 is now available for the two leading Java development environments:

Ceylon IDE for IntelliJ was designed for high performance in large projects with many Java dependencies, and is currently the best-performing IDE for Ceylon.

Changes

Enhancements to the language and command-line distribution include:

Naturally, the release incorporates many more bugfixes, minor enhancements, and performance improvements.

Support for Docker

Docker images for Ceylon are now available, making it very easy to run Ceylon programs in a Docker container.

IDE Changes

Ceylon IDE for IntelliJ is a brand-new development tool for IntelliJ IDEA and Android Studio, featuring incremental error reporting, code completion, basic refactoring, many intention actions, sophisticated navigation, searching, type hierarchy and file structure, online documentation, full integration with Ceylon Herd and much, much more.

Ceylon IDE for IntelliJ is written mostly in Ceylon, and reuses the Ceylon IDE Common project, the core of Ceylon IDE for Eclipse, which was completely rewritten in Ceylon.

Almost 60 issues were fixed in Ceylon IDE for Eclipse, and code completion was redesigned around a non-blocking approach which is much more responsive in large projects. In addition, improvements to the typechecker have resulted in significantly lower memory usage.

SDK Changes

Exactly 40 issues affecting the Ceylon SDK have been fixed.

Migration from Ceylon 1.2.2

Ceylon 1.3.0 is backward-compatible with Ceylon 1.2.2, and so it's not necessary to recompile or change dependencies. However, upgrading to version 1.3.0 of any Ceylon platform module is recommended.

About Ceylon

Ceylon is a modern, modular, statically typed programming language for the Java and JavaScript virtual machines. The language features a flexible and very readable syntax, a unique and uncommonly elegant static type system, a powerful module architecture, and excellent tooling, including an awesome IDE supporting both IntelliJ IDEA and the Eclipse platform.

Ceylon enables the development of cross-platform modules that execute portably in both virtual machine environments. Alternatively, a Ceylon module may target one or the other platform, in which case it may interoperate with native code written for that platform.

In the box

This release includes:

  • a complete language specification that defines the syntax and semantics of Ceylon in language accessible to the professional developer,
  • a command line toolset including compilers for Java and JavaScript, a documentation compiler, a test runner, a WAR archive packager, a "fat" JAR packager, and support for executing modular programs on the JVM and Node.js,
  • a powerful module architecture for code organization, dependency management, and module isolation at runtime, which also supports interoperation with OSGi, Jigsaw, Maven, and npm, and
  • the language module, our minimal, cross-platform, foundation-level API.

Available separately:

  • updated versions of the platform modules that comprise the Ceylon SDK,
  • a code formatter as a plugin for the ceylon command,
  • a plugin for the ceylon command that supports compilation and execution for the Dart VM, and
  • two full-featured integrated development environments: for Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA.

Language

Ceylon is a highly understandable object-oriented language with static typing. The language features:

  • an emphasis upon readability and a strong bias toward omission or elimination of potentially-harmful or potentially-ambiguous constructs and toward highly disciplined use of static types,
  • an extremely powerful and uncommonly elegant type system combining subtype and parametric polymorphism with:
    • first-class union and intersection types,
    • both declaration-site and use-site variance, and
    • the use of principal types for local type inference and flow-sensitive typing,
  • a unique treatment of function and tuple types, enabling powerful abstractions, along with the most elegant approach to null of any modern language,
  • first-class constructs for defining modules and dependencies between modules,
  • a very flexible syntax including comprehensions and support for expressing tree-like structures,
  • fully-reified generic types, on both the JVM and JavaScript virtual machines, and a unique typesafe metamodel.

More information about these language features may be found in the feature list and quick introduction.

Community

The Ceylon community site, https://ceylon-lang.org, includes documentation, and information about getting involved.

Source code

The source code for Ceylon, its specification, and its website, is freely available from GitHub.

Information about Ceylon's open source licenses is available here.

Issues

Bugs and suggestions may be reported in GitHub's issue tracker.

Acknowledgement

As always, we're deeply grateful to the community volunteers who contributed a substantial part of the current Ceylon codebase, working in their own spare time. The following people have contributed to Ceylon:

Gavin King, Stéphane Épardaud, Tako Schotanus, Tom Bentley, David Festal, Enrique Zamudio, Bastien Jansen, Emmanuel Bernard, Aleš Justin, Tomáš Hradec, James Cobb, Ross Tate, Max Rydahl Andersen, Mladen Turk, Lucas Werkmeister, Roland Tepp, Diego Coronel, Matej Lazar, John Vasileff, Toby Crawley, Julien Viet, Loic Rouchon, Stephane Gallès, Ivo Kasiuk, Corbin Uselton, Paco Soberón, Michael Musgrove, Daniel Rochetti, Henning Burdack, Luke deGruchy, Rohit Mohan, Griffin DeJohn, Casey Dahlin, Gilles Duboscq, Tomasz Krakowiak, Alexander Altman, Alexander Zolotko, Alex Szczuczko, Andrés G. Aragoneses, Anh Nhan Nguyen, Brice Dutheil, Carlos Augusto Mar, Charles Gould, Chris Gregory, klinger, Martin Voelkle, Mr. Arkansas, Paŭlo Ebermann, Vorlent, Akber Choudhry, Renato Athaydes, Flavio Oliveri, Michael Brackx, Brent Douglas, Lukas Eder, Markus Rydh, Julien Ponge, Pete Muir, Nicolas Leroux, Brett Cannon, Geoffrey De Smet, Guillaume Lours, Gunnar Morling, Jeff Parsons, Jesse Sightler, Oleg Kulikov, Raimund Klein, Sergej Koščejev, Chris Marshall, Simon Thum, Maia Kozheva, Shelby, Aslak Knutsen, Fabien Meurisse, Sjur Bakka, Xavier Coulon, Ari Kast, Dan Allen, Deniz Türkoglu, F. Meurisse, Jean-Charles Roger, Johannes Lehmann, allentc, Nikolay Tsankov, Chris Horne, Gabriel Mirea, Georg Ragaller, Harald Wellmann, Oliver Gondža, Stephen Crawley, Byron Clark, Francisco Reverbel, Jonas Berlin, Luke Hutchison, Nikita Ostroumov, Santiago Rodriguez, Sean Flanigan, Schalk W. Cronjé.

Comments

Object construction and validation

Gavin King
05 April 2016

When porting Java code to Ceylon, I sometimes run into Java classes where the constructor mixes validation with initialization. Let's illustrate what I mean with a simple but very contrived example.

Some bad code

Consider this Java class. (Try not to write code like this at home, kiddies!)

public class Period {

    private final Date startDate;
    private final Date endDate;

    //returns null if the given String
    //does not represent a valid Date
    private Date parseDate(String date) {
       ...
    }

    public Period(String start, String end) {
        startDate = parseDate(start);
        endDate = parseDate(end);
    }

    public boolean isValid() {
        return startDate!=null && endDate!=null;
    }

    public Date getStartDate() {
        if (startDate==null) 
            throw new IllegalStateException();
        return startDate;
    }

    public Date getEndDate() {
        if (endDate==null)
            throw new IllegalStateException();
        return endDate;
    }
}

Hey, I warned you it was going to be contrived. But it's really not uncommon to find stuff like this in real Java code.

The problem here is that even if validation of the input parameters (in the elided parseDate() method) fails, we still receive an instance of Period. But the Period we get isn't actually in a "valid" state. What do I mean by that, precisely?

Well, I would say that an object is in an invalid state if it can't respond meaningfully to its public operations. In this case, getStartDate() and getEndDate() can throw an IllegalStateException, which is a condition I would consider not "meaningful".

Another way to look at this is that what we have here is a failure of type safety in the design of Period. Unchecked exceptions represent a "hole" in the type system. So a more typesafe design for Period would be one which never uses unchecked exceptions—that doesn't throw IllegalStateException, in this case.

(Actually, in practice, in real code, I'm more likely to encounter a getStartDate() which doesn't check for null, and actually results in a NullPointerException further down the line, which is even worse.)

We can easily translate the above Period class to Ceylon:

shared class Period(String start, String end) {

    //returns null if the given String
    //does not represent a valid Date
    Date? parseDate(String date) => ... ;

    value maybeStartDate = parseDate(start);
    value maybeEndDate = parseDate(end);

    shared Boolean valid
        => maybeStartDate exists 
        && maybeEndDate exists;

    shared Date startDate {
        assert (exists maybeStartDate);
        return maybeStartDate;
    }

    shared Date endDate {
        assert (exists maybeEndDate);
        return maybeEndDate;
    }
}

And, of course, this code suffers from the same problem as the original Java code. The two assertions are screaming at us that there is a problem with the typesafety of the code.

Making the Java code better

How could we improve this code in Java. Well, here's a case where Java's much-maligned checked exceptions would be a really reasonable solution! We could slightly change Period to throw a checked exception from its constructor:

public class Period {

    private final Date startDate;
    private final Date endDate;

    //throws if the given String
    //does not represent a valid Date
    private Date parseDate(String date)
            throws DateFormatException {
       ...
    }

    public Period(String start, String end) 
            throws DateFormatException {
        startDate = parseDate(start);
        endDate = parseDate(end);
    }

    public Date getStartDate() {
        return startDate;
    }

    public Date getEndDate() {
        return endDate;
    }
}

Now, with this solution, we can never get a Period in an invalid state, and the code which instantiates Period is obligated by the compiler to handle the case of invalid input by catching the DateFormatException somewhere.

try {
    Period p = new Period(start, end);
    ...
}
catch (DateFormatException dfe) {
    ...
}

This is a good and excellent and righteous use of checked exceptions, and it's unfortunate that I only rarely find Java code which uses checked exceptions like this.

Making the Ceylon code better

What about Ceylon? Ceylon doesn't have checked exceptions, so we'll have to look for a different solution. Typically, in cases where Java would call for use of a function that throws a checked exception, Ceylon would call for the use of a function that returns a union type. Since the initializer of a class can't return any type other than the class itself, we'll need to extract some of the mixed initialization/validation logic into a factory function.

//returns DateFormatError if the given 
//String does not represent a valid Date
Date|DateFormatError parseDate(String date) => ... ;

shared Period|DateFormatError parsePeriod
        (String start, String end) {
    value startDate = parseDate(start);
    if (is DateFormatError startDate) {
        return startDate;
    }
    value endDate = parseDate(end);
    if (is DateFormatError endDate)  {
        return endDate;
    }
    return Period(startDate, endDate);
}

shared class Period(startDate, endDate) {
    shared Date startDate;
    shared Date endDate;
}

The caller is forced by the type system to deal with DateFormatError:

value p = parsePeriod(start, end);
if (is DateFormatError p) {
    ...
}
else {
    ...
}

Or, if we didn't care about the actual problem with the given date format (probable, given that the initial code we were working from lost that information), we could just use Null instead of DateFormatError:

//returns null if the given String 
//does not represent a valid Date
Date? parseDate(String date) => ... ;

shared Period? parsePeriod(String start, String end)
    => if (exists startDate = parseDate(start), 
           exists endDate = parseDate(end))
       then Period(startDate, endDate)
       else null;

shared class Period(startDate, endDate) {
    shared Date startDate;
    shared Date endDate;
}

At least arguably, the approach of using a factory function is superior, since in general it obtains better separation between validation logic and object initialization. This is especially useful in Ceylon, where the compiler enforces some quite heavy-handed restrictions on object initialization logic in order to guarantee that all fields of the object are assigned exactly once.

Summary

In conclusion:

  • Try to separate validation from initialization, wherever reasonable.
  • Validation logic doesn't usually belong in constructors (especially not in Ceylon).
  • Don't create objects in "invalid" states.
  • An "invalid" state can sometimes be detected by looking for failures of typesafety.
  • In Java, a constructor or factory function that throws a checked exception is a reasonable alternative.
  • In Ceylon, a factory function that returns a union type is a reasonable alternative.
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