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


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
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.
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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