All,
  I'm giving generics a shot, and I'm getting this warning:  Type safety:
The cast from Object to ArrayList<RequestBean> is actually checking against
the erased type

What I'm wondering is:
1) is this really a problem?
2) Assuming my code is weak, what changes are required to satisfy the
compiler such that I stop receiving the warning?
3) Are generics really beneficial here at all? It seems the only thing I
gained by adding the 4 instances of <RequestBean> was not having to cast to
(RequestBean) in the code that calls this method. Of course, when I remove
all parameters and do it the "old" way, I get the warning "Type safety: The
method get(int) belongs to the raw type ArrayList. References to generic
type ArrayList<E> should be parameterized". But that's neither here nor
there.

Here's the offending code, with the junk removed:

    public ArrayList<RequestBean> getPendingRequests(String envIDs,
            Integer serverGroupID){
                ArrayList<RequestBean> ar_RequestBeans = new
ArrayList<RequestBean>();

           ar_RequestBeans = (ArrayList<RequestBean>)
runner.query(cn,sql,h);

       return ar_RequestBeans;
    }

FYI, runner is an apache DBUtils.QueryRunner object, and query() returns
Object.

Thanks in advance for the teaching.

Marc