The Explorer

Google Guava has a lot of interesting utility classes, just to name a few: Optional, Joiner, Splitter, EventBus, Collections2 etc. But the essence of the whole library is condensed in just one single class – FluentIterable.

The FluentIterable class let’s you combine a set of operations on a collection in a single pipeline, plus it has some nifty methods too :).

To start a pipeline, you should use the simple FluentIterable.from(collection) method:

Then you can perform typical collection operations. For the purpose of the example, let assume that we want to square all even numbers from 1 to 100 and select from the result the first number that is greater than 17 and smaller than 50.

Note that for a range comparison I have used the Guava Range class which is a cool utility for dealing with ranges. One can also replace the “generateInput” method with a combination of a ContiguousSet and Range invocations:

The last but not the least interesting method in the FluentIterable is the transformAndConcat method. It allows to perform a transformation of a collection of some objects and merge the outputs, assuming that the result of a single item transformation was also a collection. This is very handy for situations like making a flat structure from some kind of Tree or a nested List. A common example is a list of files in a tree structure of the file system.

Note in the above example, that I have used an “identity function”. The identity function is a function that simply returns its input.

We are near the end, so for the close up I would like to tell a few words about performance. I have done some tests using the Google Caliper benchmarking library. The case was about squaring every item of a collection which was an even number. I have made two implementations:

…a vanilla Java one:

… and a Guava based one:

The test:

The test was run 10 times (10 reps) for 20 trials. On the average the Guava solution took about 1,5x time of the Java one.

All in all I think that the performance penalty is not very big and it is beneficial to use the FluentIterable class for the sake of coding pleasure, readability and testability.

Tags: google caliper, google guava, java

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 16th, 2013 at %I:%M %p and is filed under java, programowanie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.