On my previous post I introduce some advanced things about generics, when I discovered I forgot a very important feature.

As specified before, you can declare a generic type on a method declaration.

public <T> T newInstance(Class <T>clzz, String name) throws IllegalAccessException, InstantiationException
{
   return (T) Spring.getBean( "myBean" );
}

disregarding for a moment the ugly cast. (in this case you better use Class#cast function).
as you can see, I don’t really need “clzz” there. I use it only to define T.
However you can also do without it”Class clzz”.

You can also write the following function definition

public <T> T newInstance(String name) throws IllegalAccessException, InstantiationException
{
   return (T) Spring.getBean( "myBean" );
}

and call it like this

public void test() throws InstantiationException, IllegalAccessException
{
    String str = this.<String>newInstance( "guy" );
}

In this specific case, you don’t really need to specify since it is “inferred” and so the compiler will tell you

Explicit type arguments can be inferred

however when you get to inheritance and scenarios which are more complex than this one, it will no longer be inferred.

NOTE : This was tested on JDK 1.6. I am unsure about 1.5 compatibility.

Compiler Support Issue

Some of you might try this and get the following message :

type parameters of <T> T cannot be determined; no unique maximal instance exists for type variable T with upper bounds, java.lang.Object

Intellij users will run into this the fastest..

It seems this is compiler dependend.

Java has several compilers :

• Javac
• Jikes
• Eclipse

probably more, but these are the compilers intellij supports.
Each with its own advantages.

However - it seems that when working on Intellij, you get JavaC as default compiler, but that compiler cannot handle the syntax shown above!! - you can reproduce the problem from command line.

To resolve this, all you need to do is tell intellij to use Eclipse Compiler.
Settings ==> Compiler ==> Java Compiler ==> Use compiler : Eclipse

And the error will go away.
HOWEVER - NOTE - Once you use the eclipse compiler, you should insert the target/source attributes to command line :
like this :

-target 1.6 -source 1.6

or whatever version you use.

There’s also a comment in a “YouTrack” thread by intellij that explains this while suggesting a different solution.

Configuring Eclipse Compiler in a Maven Project

If you are compiling with Maven, you should define the eclipse compiler as such

<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
    <configuration>
        <compilerId>eclipse </compilerId>
        <source>1.6</source>
        <target>1.6</target>

    </configuration>
    <dependencies>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.codehaus.plexus</groupId>
            <artifactId>plexus-compiler-eclipse</artifactId>
            <version>1.8</version>
        </dependency>
    </dependencies>
</plugin>

You can also read about configuring other compiler

← PreviousNext →