I received a good amount of feedback about JCommander, and I’ve been adding a few functionalities these past few days:

• Support for multiple definition classes. Christian Gruber pointed out that it might be nice to not be restricted to just one class when you declare all your @Parameter fields. For example:

ArgsMaster.java

    public class ArgsMaster {
      @Parameter(names = "-master")
      public String master;
    }

ArgsSlave.java

    public class ArgsSlave {
      @Parameter(names = "-slave")
      public String slave;
    }

You then pass these objects when you create your JCommander instance, which will collect all the parameter definitions from both objects.

    ArgsMaster m = new ArgsMaster();
    ArgsSlave s = new ArgsSlave();
    String[] argv = { "-master", "master", "-slave", "slave" };
    new JCommander(new Object[] { m , s }, argv);
    Assert.assertEquals(m.master, "master");
    Assert.assertEquals(s.slave, "slave");

• Support for required. For simple applications, you can just declare @Parameter(required = true) and JCommander will enforce that all such parameters are assigned a value (example).
• Internationalization. You can now use the standard Java resource bundle mechanism to write the descriptions of your options and have JCommander automatically use the translated strings (example).
• Parameters that take more than one value (arities). This functionality allows you to parse command lines such as:

    java Main -pairs slave master foo.xml

Here, the parameter -pairs needs the next two arguments (example). All these features are now available in JCommander 1.0, which Maven users can download automatically with the following dependency:

  com.beust
  jcommander
  1.0