I work in an environment where a great deal of our day to day scripting tasks occur through calling remote services as opposed to working with the database.

For a lot of scripting tasks I've often used Groovy, and one of the most useful features of Groovy specifically for that task has been it's built in fluent Builders.

Now Groovy builders exploit a few Groovy language features that are never going to make it into Java.

Most notably Groovy builders make use of Groovy's Meta programming features which isn't coming to Java any time soon.

However, a key feature that Groovy builders have is their hierarchical approach to building constructs.

This allows the builders to neatly and safely create nested tree like constructs which can be used to model everything from UX form layouts to XML.

This approach we can at least model quite succinctly using Java 8 lambda expressions.

For my sample I decided to take a reasonably simple Maven pom file and see if I could create a builder to handle that.

All the code for the builder is available on Github here.

The pom.xml file is as follows:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>  
 <project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0"  
      xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"  
      xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">  
   <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>  
   <groupId>com.github</groupId>  
   <artifactId>lambda-builder</artifactId>  
   <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>  
   <dependencies>  
     <dependency>  
       <groupId>junit</groupId>  
       <artifactId>junit</artifactId>  
       <version>4.11</version>  
     </dependency>  
     <dependency>  
       <groupId>commons-beanutils</groupId>  
       <artifactId>commons-beanutils</artifactId>  
       <version>1.7.0</version>  
     </dependency>  
   </dependencies>  
   <build>  
     <plugins>  
       <plugin>  
         <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>  
         <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>  
         <configuration>  
           <source>1.8</source>  
           <target>1.8</target>  
           <fork>true</fork>  
           <compilerArgument>-proc:none</compilerArgument>  
         </configuration>  
       </plugin>  
     </plugins>  
   </build>  
 </project>  

Here is the sample code for the builder to build this model:

MarkupBuilder pom = new XmlMarkupBuilder(true, "pom")  
         .at("xmlns", "http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0")  
         .at("xmlns:xsi", "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance")  
         .at("xsi:schemaLocation", "http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd");  
     pom.el("modelVersion", "4.0.0");  
     pom.el("groupId", "com.github");  
     pom.el("artifactId", "lambda-builder");  
     pom.el("version", "1.0-SNAPSHOT");  
     pom.el("dependencies", () -> {  
       pom.el("dependency", () -> {  
         pom.el("groupId", "junit");  
         pom.el("artifactId", "junit");  
         pom.elx("version", version::get);  
       });  
       pom.el("dependency", () -> {  
         pom.el("groupId", "commons-beanutils");  
         pom.el("artifactId", "commons-beanutils");  
         pom.elx("version", version::get);  
       });  
     });  
     pom.el("build", () -> {  
       pom.el("plugins", () -> {  
         pom.el("plugin", () -> {  
           pom.el("groupId", "org.apache.maven.plugins");  
           pom.el("artifactId", "maven-compiler-plugin");  
           pom.el("configuration", () -> {  
             pom.el("source", 1.8);  
             pom.el("target", 1.8);  
             pom.el("fork", true);  
             pom.el("compilerArgument", "-proc:none");  
           });  
         });  
       });  
     });  

A few notes on this in general:

• I created a special form of some the methods which takes a java.util.function.Supplier as a parameter, and allows you to delay evaluation of a value until you traverse the builder.
• I eschewed method chaining (although I catered for it in the builder). Trying both methods I personally felt this was a lot cleaner.
• Java doesn't have all syntax sugar that Groovy has, so I used a java.lang.Runnable for the functional interface which reduced the syntax creating a closure, with the downside that you have to have a handle on the initial builder object.

Nowhere as nice as Groovy builders but nevertheless a great step forward. Can't wait for Java 8.