Filtering a list of JavaBeans with Google Guava

Question

In a Java program, I have a list of beans that I want to filter based on a specific property.

For example, say I have a list of Person, a JavaBean, where Person has

Answer 1

Explaining your doubts from the sentence:

So far, I've thought about combining Guava with Apache beanutils, but that doesn't seem elegant.

Java, despite of being so popular, lacks first-class function support^*, what is subject to change in Java 8, where you will be able to do:

Iterable  filtered = filter(allPersons, (Person p) -> acceptedNames.contains(p.getName()));

With lambdas and it will be elegant.

Until then you have choose between:

• old-school way (like @Louis wrote)
• verbose Guava filter (@JB's answer)
• or other functional Java libraries (@superfav's answer).

I'd also like to add to @Lois's answer that Guava-way would be to create immutable collection, because they are better than unmodifiable, which is also described in Item 15, Minimize mutability in Effective Java by Joshua Bloch^**:

ImmutableList.Builder builder = ImmutableList.builder();
for (final Person p : allPersons) {
    if (acceptedNames.contains(p.getName())) {
        builder.add(p);
    }
}
ImmutableList filtered = builder.build();

(It's implementation detail that ImmutableList.Builder creates temporary ArrayList under the hood).

_{*: it bothers me much, I came from Python, JavaScript and Perl worlds, where functions are treated better}

_{**: Guava and Bloch are tightly coupled in many ways ;)}