Basic HTML version of Foils prepared March 23 98

Foil 27 Reflection and Introspection

From JavaBeans and Use in ComponentWare Basic Information Track Computational Science Course CPS616 -- March 25 1998. by Nancy McCracken, Geoffrey C. Fox, Wojtek Furmanski


1 Introspection refers to the process by which JavaBeans are inspected to discover their characteristics. This a combination of
  • Explicit Information provided by the BeanInfo interface where the bean fred must have BeanInfo fredBeanInfo
  • A combination of design patterns (naming conventions for methods events properties etc.) and use of the Java Reflection mechanism
2 The Java Core Reflection API allows one to determine information about objects at runtime.
  • It consists of a set of classes in the java.lang.reflect package, enhancements to the Class class and extensions to java.lang package to provide more uniform powerful wrapper classes for the primitive types.
3 The reflection API is used in two ways:
  • lightweight: public methods fields and constructors: this is JavaBean case
  • heavy weight: all aspects of an object: this is Object Serialization, debugger, interpreter and class browser need

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