Java AutoValue Classes vs Kotlin Data Classes

Java AutoValue classes vs Kotlin Data classes

What are AutoValue Java classes?

Google developed a library AutoValue, to help generate boilerplate code in your Java classes. You create an abstract class with abstract methods for each property you need, and it will generate toString, hashCode, and toString. It can also create builder boilerplate code. We can also use this with Moshi, Gson, etc. auto/index.md at master · google/auto

Why migrate to Kotlin data classes?

Kotlin data classes will already create these functions for you. We also don’t need to use the Builder design pattern in Kotlin because it has default and named parameters. Although we can use a companion object if you wanted to create something similar to a Java Builder class in Kotlin. Data classes | Kotlin

Java Record Classes

Java 14 has recently announced record classes that are similar to Kotlin data classes. Obviously, there are limitations for projects that may require extra work to use Java 14. Records Come to Java

How can we automate migrating AutoValue Java classes to Kotlin data classes?

Luckily the good people at Slack created a library auto-value-kotlin. GitHub - slackhq/auto-value-kotlin: An AutoValue extension that generates binary and source…

Next, I will show you how to create an AutoValue Java class.

Create a Java AutoValue Class

Add the AutoValue dependencies to Gradle. Your build.gradle file should look like this: {% gist https://gist.github.com/cmcoffeedev/304e215cb2fe7344cde75d323e73098a.js %} Sync Gradle and you should see that AutoValue was added to your external libraries. {% gist https://gist.github.com/cmcoffeedev/163d4f421b21445a218ec39c1c59fa4d.js %} “AutoValue_Post” will be underlined red, but go ahead and rebuild the project and it will generate this code: {% gist https://gist.github.com/cmcoffeedev/e0c13bfb643744479aa311813d0538d7.js %} In another post, I will discuss how to use Slack’s auto-value-kotlin library.

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