Genericized commons collection

Question

I'm astonished that the Apache Commons Collections project still hasn't got around to making their library generics-aware. I really like the features provided by this library, but the lack of support for generics is a big turn-off. There is a Lavalabs fork of Commons Collections which does support generics, which seems to claim backward compatibility, but when I tried updating to this version, my web application failed to start (in JBoss).

My questions are:

• Whether anyone has successfully updated from Commons Collections to the fork mentioned above
• If Commons Collections has any plans to add support for generics

BTW, I'm aware of Google collections, but am reluctant to use it until the API stabilises.

Cheers, Don

Answer 1

There are contributions. Checkout the jira's

There is also a JDK5 branch.

We do would like to add generics and update Commons Collections to 1.5 (and 1.6). The biggest problem is how to address backwards compatibility. And people have very different opinions there. For some of the Commons components the newer JDK almost asks for a rewrite for the new JDKs IMHO.

During ApacheCon I felt the urge across several people to get this moving though. It's just a big task.

Feel free to show up on dev@commons.apache.org

cheers, Torsten