Generics In Java

Date: May 27

Time: 11:00

Room: CGN C004

Speaker: Jeroen Snijders

Title: Generics in Java (slides in pdf)

Abstract

One of the main issues addressed by object-oriented languages like Java is reusability. Unfortunately, classes or methods designed for reuse often fail to provide type-safety to the programmer because the used types are too general. A good example of this are the collection classes in Java: Since collection classes -for example java.utils.Stack- can store every type of Object; the returntype of a function like 'pop()' cannot be more specific than Object. When popping a String-object of a Stack the programmer must explicitely cast this Object to a String. The Java-compiler is not able to determine statically if a cast will succeed or not; so if the popped Object is not an instance of String the cast will cause a runtime-failure.

Generics or Parameterized Polymorphism provide a way to abstract over types without losing type-safety.

This presentation will cover:

• the basics of generics in OO languages
• generics in the new Java release Tiger (JavaTM 2 SDK, Standard Edition, Version 1.5.0)
• how generics are integrated in Java
• how generics could be integrated in Java