Type-Safety in Common Degister 3

Commons Digester is a Java library to parse XML data into Java objects. Calling the parse method on a Digester object with an file containing the XML data as argument returns the object on the top of the object tree corresponding to the XML data. The XML data may be arbitrary, so does the the type of the returned object. For this obvious reason, the parse method return type, in Digester 1 and 2, is Object (java.lang.Object). Clients of the library have to cast the returned objects into whatever types they actually are. This approach lacks type-safety. At compile time, no incorrect casting may be caught. A incorrect casting will throw a ClassCastException at runtime.

After generic was introduced into Java in Java 5, many libraries were improved with generic to increase type-safety. There were such efforts in Commons Digester 3, too. In Digester 3, a parse method of the Digester class is a generic method. Each parse method has a type parameter (<T>) and the return type is the abstract type T instead of Object. When the return is assigned to a variable, Java compiler can infer the type for the return. Class casting is no longer needed in the client code. This may give an impression that the risk of runtime ClassCastException is prevented. That is really a false insurance. In this case, what the generic method provides is just what is called auto-casting, that is, instead of the client code, the service code does the casting, with help of generic. All the benefit here is the convenience that the client does not need casting anymore. No risk of casting is prevented or reduced.

It is worth to point out that the Digester class is a non-generic class while the parse methods are generic methods. If an abstract type is at the same time of the type of more than one parameters and return of a generic method, the compiler can check the arguments and the variable to assign return to infer the concrete type and ensure the arguments and the return are assignable to the concrete type inferred. That increases type-safety comparing with using Object as the type for method parameters and return. It is not the case for the parse methods of the Digester class. In the case of the parse methods of the Digester class. The abstract type is only the type of the return. There is no way for the compiler to infer the right concrete type.