I’ve never really been a big fan of the syntax of java.lang.Comparable.compareTo(). For some reason I find myself constantly referring to the JavaDocs to remind me whether < 0 or > 0 means the argument is less vs more than the callee.

So I decided to do something about it, and created a minimal API with the sole purpose of improving readability of compareTo().

The API supplies methods in two flavors, expressive or abbreviated. The expressive version looks like this:

import static se.jiderhamn.CompareTo.is;

...
  boolean oneIsZero = is(1).equalTo(0);
  boolean aIsNotZero = is(a).notEqualTo(0);
  boolean bIsZero = is(b).zero();
  boolean value1LessThanValue2 = is(value1).lessThan(value2);
    
  if(is(a).lessThanOrEqualTo(b)) {
    ...
  }

  boolean date1AfterDate2 = is(date1).greaterThan(date2);

  if(is(a).greaterThanOrEqualTo(b)) {
    ...
  }

The abbreviated syntax looks like this:

import static se.jiderhamn.CompareTo.is;

...
  boolean oneIsZero = is(1).eq(0);
  boolean aIsNotZero = is(a).ne(0);
  boolean value1LessThanValue2 = is(value1).lt(value2);

  if(is(a).le(b)) {
    ...
  }

  boolean date1AfterDate2 = is(date1).gt(date2);

  if(is(a).ge(b)) {
    ...
  }

The API is available on Maven Central:

    <dependency>
      <groupId>se.jiderhamn</groupId>
      <artifactId>compare-to</artifactId>
      <version>1.1.1</version>
    </dependency>

Source are on GitHub.

Manual download here.