jDTO Binder gains experimental support for compile-time config validation

One of the most frustrating things that emerge when working with a framework is misconfiguration, specially if we find out of this misconfiguration on runtime or worse, after moving the application into production.

Normally when frameworks suffer this kind of weakness, developers might decide to create IDE-specific plugins or extra tooling to prevent unwanted and unnoticed runtime misconfiguration. The object to object mapping framework I've developed (jDTO Binder) is a great tool but sadly suffers from this issue so, as part of release 1.5, I am currently developing a set of tools that aim to ease the development. The first of this tool is a compile-time annotation processor that can validate the configuration for a given DTO.

Annotation Config Validation

The great thing of compile-time annotation processors is that are able to integrate with any IDE and they're able to have the build failing if a misconfiguration is detected.

Here is how it looks jDTO Binder compile-time verifier out of the box in Netbeans IDE 7.2:

Currently this is experimental and I'm working on the idea, the specific validations that will be performed and the way this validations should manifest will emerge on the development of this idea and for the time being very experimental and limited support is implemented but hopefully it will plot on improved productivity.

In the current state the compile time verifier functionality checks and prints compile-time warnings when the source property of a given DTO field is mistyped and also encourages the user to place annotations on getters instead of on fields following a performance suggestion showed on the official documentation.