Question

I’m working with an older Java application that was written for Java 1.4, before Generics were available. Since then, we have completed our upgrade to Java 6.

We are now looking into making a change to support Generics in our collections for the benefit of compile time type safety checks, and to preserve developer sanity.

Are there any caveats or gotchas we should be aware of in performing this upgrade?

Answer 1

1. Understand how Java generics work, and their limitations.
2. Use an IDE with good refactoring support.
3. Do it slowly and carefully.
4. Do the simple things first, and don’t leap into creating complicated generic classes, etc until you know they are really required.
5. Resist the temptation to add @SuppressWarning("unchecked") to make warnings go away.

Nothing particularly profound here …