Sunday, May 27, 2007

Adding Annotations to JRuby Using Ruby

I love how meta-programmable Ruby is.

JRuby doesn't support annotations because Ruby doesn't support annotations. So what! We can extend Ruby to add something like annotations:

class JPABean
def self.inherited(clazz)
@@annotations = {}
def self.anno(annotation)
@@last_annotation = annotation

def self.method_added(sym)
@@annotations[sym] = @@last_annotation

def self.get_annotation(sym)
return @@annotations[sym]
Given this, we can do things like the following:

class MyBean :sql => "SELECT * FROM stuff WHERE name = 'foo'"
def foo; end

anno :field => :hello_id
attr :hello

anno :field => :bar_in_table
attr_accessor :bar
And here's some output from the resulting class:

p MyBean.get_annotation(:foo)
p MyBean.get_annotation(:hello)
p MyBean.get_annotation(:bar=)


{:sql=>"SELECT * FROM stuff WHERE name = 'foo'"}
So as you can see we really do have all the necessary requirements to annotate classes. Now what if we just had MyBean be a java.lang.Object extension and stuffed the annotations into the resulting generated class? We can already create real Java classes in this way, but with the above syntax and a little magic in the JRuby Java integration later, we've got annotation support in on Java classes too. This should enable things like Hibernate, JPA, and JUnit 4 to work with JRuby's Ruby-based classes. Or at least, I believe it to be possible. It just requires a little work to add annotation information to the resulting generated classes.



  1. Hmm, I would prefer a syntax like this:

    p MyBean.annotations[:foo]


    class JPABean
    self.attr_accessor :annotations

  2. @zimba

    Very nice! That should avoid overwriting the annotations. What if we expand the syntax a bit more like this:

    def self.anno(*annotations)
    (@@last_annotation ||= {}).merge! annotations

    So this should let us do this:

    anno :anno1 => 'My test anno1', :anno2 => 'My test anno2'

    Also, we could expand this just a bit further, and alias the method:

    alias :annotate, :anno

    (since I rather like a full method name, rather than a cryptic abbreviation)

  3. @daniel: This bit:


    Would actually just make `annotations' be an array with one hash. To achieve the effect you were probably going for, you'd need to do:

    anno { :anno1 => 'My test anno1' }, { :anno2 => 'My test anno2' }

    Where the {}s would be optional on the second hash. Otherwise, the original definition of anno would still capture both annotations as part of the same hash.

    Looks pretty rockin' :-)

  4. @antonio

    Nope, I'm going for this:

    anno {:anno1 => 'My Test anno1', :anno2 => 'My Test anno2'}

    (curly-braces are obviously optional) Which, come to think of it would require a slightly different method signature:

    def self.anno(annotation)
    (@@last_annotation ||= {}).merge!(annotation)

    Since annotation would then be a proper, multi element hash (something I sort of failed to realize on my first pass through the comments). :-) So, zimbatm was right all along...

  5. "JRuby doesn't support annotations because Ruby doesn't support annotations."

    This sounds like a jealousy in respect to groovy :)

  6. Good starter implementation. Unfortunately it gets more complex when defining annotations in modules. Facets' Annotations addressed this. Will that work in JRuby? NOTE The lib will get an official independent release soon. That'll be a good time to try it out.