Package javassist.tools.reflect

Runtime Behavioral Reflection.

(also recently known as interceptors or AOP?)

This package enables a metaobject to trap method calls and field accesses on a regular Java object. It provides a class Reflection, which is a main module for implementing runtime behavioral reflection. It also provides a class Loader and Compiler as utilities for dynamically or statically translating a regular class into a reflective class.

An instance of the reflective class is associated with a runtime metaobject and a runtime class metaobject, which control the behavior of that instance. The runtime metaobject is created for every (base-level) instance but the runtime class metaobject is created for every (base-level) class. Metaobject is the root class of the runtime metaobject and ClassMetaobject is the root class of the runtime class metaobject.

This package is provided as a sample implementation of the reflection mechanism with Javassist. All the programs in this package uses only the regular Javassist API; they never call any hidden methods.

The most significant class in this package is Reflection. See the description of this class first.

Interface Summary

Interface	Description
Metalevel	An interface to access a metaobject and a class metaobject.

Class Summary

Class	Description
ClassMetaobject	A runtime class metaobject.
Compiler	A bytecode translator for reflection.
Loader	A class loader for reflection.
Metaobject	A runtime metaobject.
Reflection	The class implementing the behavioral reflection mechanism.
Sample	A template used for defining a reflective class.

Exception Summary

Exception	Description
CannotCreateException	Signals that ClassMetaobject.newInstance() fails.
CannotInvokeException	Thrown when method invocation using the reflection API has thrown an exception.
CannotReflectException	Thrown by makeReflective() in Reflection when there is an attempt to reflect a class that is either an interface or a subclass of either ClassMetaobject or Metaobject.