Guava Predicates – Programming with Intention

Last updated on 2012-12-11

Last month I discovered Google’s Guava library, a really useful set of utility classes for everyday java programming. One of these classes, better yet, one concept that I have grown to love are Predicates.

A Predicate is a very simple interface that determines truth or falsehood for a given input. Just that. So what is so good about this interface?. I’ll show you with an example, taken directly from my code. Let’s say that I have a list with all the procedural links connected to a process, and I wanted to filter the list for conditional links. This is the typical way to do this:

    List instrumentLinks = new ArrayList();
    for(OPMProceduralLink link : allProceduralLinks) {
      switch(link.getKind()) {
        case CONSUMPTION_CONDITION:
        case EFFECT_CONDITION:
        case INSTRUMENT_CONDITION:
          instrumentLinks.add(link);
      }
    }

There is nothing wrong with this code. It’s just that it doesn’t show intention. Most programmers will understand what I wanted to achieve after reading the lines, because they understand how I achieved it.

This is where Predicates come to the rescue. First, I created a class that implements Predicate and returns true when it is given a OPMProceduralLink with OPMProceduralLinkKind.INSTRUMENT:

public enum IsOPMConditionalLink implements Predicate {
  INSTANCE;

  @Override
  public boolean apply(final OPMProceduralLink link) {
    switch(link.getKind()) {
      case CONSUMPTION_CONDITION:
      case EFFECT_CONDITION:
      case INSTRUMENT_CONDITION:
        return true;
    }
    return false;
  }
}

Since the Predicate has no state, I use an enum for the Singleton instance. Now to filter the list I only have to write one line of code:

Collection instrumentLinks = Collections2.filter(allProceduralLinks, IsOPMConditionalLink.INSTANCE);

I think this code tells the reader a lot more, with a lot less. And makes it more understandable – one of the main goals of every good programmer.

P.S.: I know there are subtle differences, like using a Collection instead of a list (and there is a reason why a List is not filtered). But most of the time there is no difference.