You Might Stop Using Lombok’s @Builder After Reading This
1. Overview
Lombok is a Java library that can generate known patterns of code for us, allowing us to reduce the boilerplate code. For instance, we can leverage Lombok to generate all the getters and setters for a class.
In this article, we’ll discuss Lombok’s @Builder annotation, which implements the builder design pattern for us. We’ll see its advantages and some of the drawbacks it can bring.
After that, we’ll use Lombok’s configuration to achieve the same functionality in a more straightforward manner.
2. @Builder and Lombok’s Magic
Let’s start by looking into a simple use-case where the @Builder annotation can come in handy.
For the code examples in this article, we’ll use the Student data model:
Because our class is annotated with @Builder, we can instance a Student using syntax associated with the builder design pattern:
