They say it’s those little things in life. I believe the same is very much true for your code as well. Here’s an example with casting and generics in Java.

After a long hard day in the code editor I often find that what makes me happy about my day, and the work I check in to our SCM, is not always the additions to an advanced algorithm, or an insanely compact chunk of awesomeness, but it’s more often a small piece of beautiful code. One of the ugliest lines of code I see in Java, are lines involved with casting.

I recently started doing a bit of coding on a web application a couple of weeks back. Suddenly I found myself writing a lot of casting statements when fetching data from session, which made my code want to crawl out of the editor due to it’s own ugliness. Here is an example:

Session webappSession = ...

Map<String, Map<String, Collection<Entity>>> myUglyMap = (Map<String, Map<String, Collection<Entity>>>)(webappSession.getAttribute("myUglyMap"));

Oh boy! I figured there must be some other way to write this. With our static imports fever as of late I came up with a tiny piece of code which made me go home smiling that day. That little thing which made it all so much more beautiful…

public static <T> T cast(Object o) {

    return (T) o;

}

Placed in a easily accessible class in your favourite toolbox project, the messy snippet above quickly becomes much better:

import static com.mydomain.CastUtils.cast;

/* snipp */

Session webappSession = ...

Map<String, Map<String, Collection<Entity>>> beautiful = cast(webappSession.getAttribute("beautiful"));

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