Writing less verbose Java Beans with Groovy Beans

Java Beans are very popular among Java developers. A Java Bean is essentially data with little or no behavior (depending on the implementation). Formally, a Java Bean is a Java class that is serializable, has a public no-argument constructor, private fields, and getter and setter methods for accessing the fields. Often, POJO (Plain Old Java Object) and a Java Bean are used interchangeably.

In this recipe, we will show how Groovy can save you from a lot of typing by offering several features for bean class creation built into the language and API.

Getting ready

A typical Java Bean looks like the following code snippet:

public class Student implements Serializable {

  private Long id;
  private String name;
  private String lastName;

  // more attributes

  public Student() {
    // NO-ARGS CONSTRUCTOR
  }

  // more constructors

  public void setId(final Long id) {
      this.id = id;
  }

  public Long getId() {
      return id;
  }

  public...