Make this available in Java 7?

[bbottema]

Hi @dnault,

What an innovative and interesting way of including Javadoc in runtime! Reminds me of Lombok.

I would love to use this library in my own open source library Simple Java Mail, but I'm restricted to Java 7 and your library is out of reach because of that. Is it possible to make this library available to Java 7? I know what a pain it is to not be able to use Java 8 for my own library, but since Java 7 is still is used by a significant audience I have no choice if I want to service them.

I would love to try and make this library work for my own use case, which is that I'm using Java reflection to generate CLI support and I would like to use therapi-runtime-javadoc to dynamically include the Javadoc as documentation. Otherwise I would have to maintain the documentation both in Javadoc as well as annotations. You library would reach a lot of people if I could use it somehow.

[dnault]

Hi Benny. I'm open to this idea. Not sure what to do about the public API, which uses java.util.Optional.

[bbottema]

I'm afraid there is no elegant solution for that, it's a breaking change for sure. Best thing you can do for that is include your own version of just the Optional class. Current users would only have to update their imports.

[bbottema]

I was just looking into converting Optional for Java 7, but it is not a trivial task. I think the better option would be to use Guava v20's battle-tested Optional version or shade/shadow in something like https://github.com/MrHadiSatrio/Optional into your jar as a dependency.

Or just drop it alltogether and annotate your methods with @Nullable etc. instead, which nowadays is widely supported by IDE's and analyses tools (that's what I do as well until the world is ready to forget about Java 7).

[dnault]

Thank you, Benny!

[dnault]

Hi Benny,

Version 0.7.0 now is available on Maven Central with support for Java 7.

I ended up dodging the @Nullable issue by using the Null Object pattern; instead of returning null, it now returns a dummy object that models absent Javadoc.

In the project where I use this library, this change actually lead to simpler code than using Optional... so that's pretty cool. Let me know how it works for you.

Thanks,
David