Scribe is a databinding library.
Many encoding libraries implement the idea of databinding, but they are typically tied to that single library. Scribe is a more general implementation which does not target a single encoding.
Classes are reflexively inspected to get information of which fields they have, how they can be constructed, and their data accessed. This is then used to integrated with existing third party solutions like Jackson and TypeSafe Config to provide the actual encoding.
Many libraries implement the idea of data-binding, but tend to do it in different ways. They provide their own annotations, procedures, have have various shortcomings or flaws. This makes interoperability between them a nightmare. It's not uncommon to have distinct set of classes just to interact with different data formats.
Only support immutable types.
Make use of Java 8 features to make things more concise. Scribe requires that you run an up-to-date Java version.
As little inspection at runtime as possible. With reflection it is hard to avoid, but the API encourages much early initialization to fail as early as possible.
Shallow stack traces. The instances you use in production have as little indirection as possible to improve performance and troubleshooting.
Never decode a value as null or
default primitive values. Look at
Optional Support if you want optional values and
fields. Any represenation of null is treated equally to the value being
absent.
With Scribe, the simple constructor is prefectly safe. No need to check
all arguments with requireNonNull. primitive types won't be assigned
an ambigiuous default value.
- Why
nullis problematic with Jackson - Why Optional is problematic with Jackson
- How to implement this behaviour with Jackson
- Why
nullis problematic with Gson
Types are general converted into a TypeMapping using the
EntityResolver, like the following example.
public class Person {
private final String name;
private final Optional<String> title;
@ConstructorProperties({"name", "title"})
public Person(final String name, final Optional<String> title) {
this.name = name;
this.title = title;
}
public String getName() {
return name;
}
public Optional<String> getTitle() {
return title;
}
}EntityResolver resolver = Scribe.defaultBuilder().build();
TypeMapping person = resolver.mapping(JavaType.of(Person.class));The following is an example using the provided Jackson support to encode and decode JSON.
final JacksonMapper mapper = new JacksonMapper(
Scribe
.defaultBuilder()
.install(new JacksonAnnotationsModule())
.build(),
new JsonFactory());
final JacksonEncoding<Person> encoding = mapper.encodingFor(Person.class);
final String encoded = encoding.encodeAsString(new Person("Jane Doe", Optional.of("Doctor")));
final Person person = encoding.decodeFromString(encoded);Optional has first-class support in Scribe.
Any field wrapped in Optional may be absent when decoding an entity. Any value wrapped in Optional may also be absent. If the value is absent it is represented as the Optional's absent instance.
The following is an example of a class using an Optional field.
public class Person {
private final String name;
private final Optional<String> title;
@ConstructorProperties({"name", "title"})
public Person(final String name, final Optional<String> title) {
this.name = name;
this.title = title;
}
public String getName() {
return name;
}
public Optional<String> getTitle() {
return title;
}
}title will not be a required field if this entity was used. But we
also take great care in making sure you don't have to handle null.
You want to support a custom type? Actually, you probably want to translate this to some already well known type. For this case we support aliasing.
Aliasing is when a type is translated to another type during
encoding/decoding. The following is an example of a simple alias for
Character to String.
public class DefaultModule implements Module {
@Override
public void register(ScribeBuilder b) {
final Function<Character, String> charToString =
c -> new String(new char[]{c});
final Function<String, Character> stringToChar = s -> s.charAt(0);
/* isPrimitive matches both char and Character */
b.typeAliasDetector(
matchAlias(
isPrimitive(char.class),
type -> simpleAlias(Character.class, String.class, charToString, stringToChar)
)
);
}
}All we need to do is describe how a Character is converted into a
String and vice-versa. The framework will do the rest.