Hi!

I'm a long time user (and big fan) of commons.lang.Validate because it's a very 
neat pattern for getting stable software modules.

I'm PMC member on Apache OpenWebBeans and currently also writing the 
maven-scm-provider-jgit (JGIT is a native Java implementation of GIT). Since 
jgit-core (the part of EGIT we use for the maven-scm-provider-jgit) is BSD and 
Shawn likes to have not too much external dependencies, I started writing my 
own little Validate helper class and had a hopefully good idea which imho would 
also be a good extension to commons.lang.Validate:

A main problem on validation is the message creation which costs a lot of 
String operations and therefor also garbage collection. I've now seen that the 
latest version in SVN has an additional object parameter for a few functions 
which addresses this problem. My proposal now goes even further but requires 
java-5 since it uses ellipsis notation.

If msgObject[0] is a String java.text.MessageFormat will be used for creating 
the failure message, e.g.
Validate.notNull(nullInt, "testMessageText Integer={0} btw! and Integer2={1}.", 
new Integer(42), new Integer(43));

example for isTrue with message construction:

/**
 * Validate that b is <code>true</code>
 * 
 * @param b boolean to validate
 * @param msgObjects additional Objects added as text message to the 
InvalidArgumentException
 */
public static void isTrue(boolean b, Object... msgObjects) {
        if (!b) {
                throw new IllegalArgumentException(getMessage(msgObjects));
        }
}

/**
 * private helper function to create an error message from the given Objects
 * If the first object in msgObjects is of type {...@code String} then 
 * {...@code MessageFormat} will be used to format the output message.
 * 
 * @param msgObjects
 * @return concatenated String representation of all the objects
 */
private static String getMessage(Object... msgObjects) {
        if (msgObjects.length > 0 && msgObjects[0] instanceof String) {
                MessageFormat form = new MessageFormat((String) msgObjects[0]);
                Object[] params = new Object[msgObjects.length - 1];
                System.arraycopy(msgObjects, 1, params, 0, msgObjects.length - 
1);
                return form.format(params);
        }
        else {
                StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer("Validation failed: [");
                for(int i = 0; i < msgObjects.length; i++) {
                        if (i > 0) {
                                sb.append(' ');
                        }
                        sb.append(msgObjects[i]);
                }
                sb.append(']');
                return sb.toString();
        }
}
        
I've tested those functions against 'old' Validate handling to ensure that 
there are no performance side effects with Java ellipsis handling, and the 
performance win is huge [1]. The ellipsis Version only takes < 5% of the time 
of the 'old' handling.

WDYT? 
a.) Is the implementation ok?
b.) Will there be a java-5 only version of commons.lang in the near future?
c.) Imho we could replace the 1-parameter versions with the proper ellipsis 
functions and we are still compile compatible. But I'm not sure if we stay 
binary-compatible (needs to be tested).

I wrote a Validate class this way for jgit-core [2] but also have to like this 
features in our owns commons.lang.Validate if possible!


txs and LieGrue,
strub

[1] http://pastebin.com/m2cf887a9

[2] 
http://github.com/sonatype/JGit/blob/2ab3a576fa67145d6a9f66efd7437c52d567eb68/org.spearce.jgit/src/org/spearce/jgit/util/Validate.java





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