[volkadav]

You might like project lombok re: getters and setters. It has a feature that implements this using annotations. True, this is an additional external dependency for a project when it'd be nice if it was a core language feature, but as external deps go it isn't a killer one -- the library is not huge and doesn't spiderweb out to a bunch of other deps.

http://projectlombok.org/features/GetterSetter.html

(There's also a lombok-pg project that offers more extensions.)

[rallison]

We actually evaluated Lombok for this reason (and others), and eventually decided against continuing with it for a few reasons:

* Every team member must install the eclipse plugin (which, if you already have any eclipse vm args set, also requires you to add a couple of extra arguments).

* No reasonable way to add javadoc comments to getters and setters without explicitly writing those getters and setters (kind of defeating the purpose of lombok).

* Sonar (which we use for static code analysis) will now report those private fields as a major warning as it thinks they are unused private fields. You can make those warning go away by adding //NOSONAR on each line, but yeah..

* Relies on internal java APIs. While the authors seem to be quite good and stay on top of things, I fear that this is still inviting issues down the road.

We felt that the cons outweighed the pros in this case, despite some of the beauty in lombok.

Disclaimer: I am a colleague of the author of the linked article.