Provide a simple example of object reflection in Java. What is reflection in Java?

The word reflection implies that the properties of whatever being examined are displayed or reflected to someone who wants to observe those properties. Similarly,
Reflection in Java is the ability to examine and/or modify the properties or behavior of an object at run-time. It’s important to note that reflection specifically applies to objects – so you need an object of a class to get information for that particular class.

Reflection is considered to be an advanced technique, and can be quite powerful when used correctly.

Reflection in Java consists of 2 primary things that you should remember:

1. Metadata. Metadata literally means data about the data. In this case, metadata means extra data that has to do with your Java program – like data about your Java classes, constructors, methods, fields, etc.

2. Functionality that allows you to manipulate the metadata as well. So, functionality that would allow you to manipulate those fields, methods, constructors, etc. You can actually call methods and constructors using Java reflection – which is an important fact to remember.

Java reflection is part of an API package

In order to use reflection in Java, you must include the necessary classes from the java.lang.reflect package since that contains all the necessary classes for implementing reflection. The one exception to this is when retrieving class metadata – for which you would use the java.lang.Class class, which is not part of the java.lang.reflect package.

Let’s look at an example of Java reflection to help clarify exactly what it does and when it can be useful.

A Simple Example of Java Reflection

Here is an easy to understand example of some code that searches up a class hierarchy to see if a particular method is defined somewhere in the inheritance tree. In other words, we are just looking for a method in the parent classes of a given class.


import java.lang.reflect.Method;
import java.lang.Class;


Method findInheritedMethod(Class classType, 
String theMethodName, Class [] methodParamTypes)
{
  Method inheritedMethod = null;
  while(classType != null)  {
        try  {
          inheritedMethod = 
classType.getDeclaredMethod(theMethodName, methodParamTypes);

        break;
      }
   
      catch (NoSuchMethodException ex)  {
 
      classType = classType.getSuperclass( ); 
         
      }
      return inheritedMethod ;
}

An explanation of the Java reflection example

As you can see in our example above, the findInheritedMethod method takes as its parameters a class name from which to start searching, a string that represents the method name being searched for, and the parameter types that the method being searched for accepts in case the method being searched for is overloaded and has multiple versions that accept different parameter types.

The way the example works above is that the current class is searched to see if the method being searched for resides in the current class. If it doesn’t then it keeps searching the superclass (the parent class) until it reaches the very top of the hierarchy – you can see that inside the catch block the parent class is retrieved and the process continues in the while loop either until the method is found or we reach the top of the inheritance hierarchy (at which point classType will be null).

Also notice that in the code above we import a class called Method. The object of the Method class – called “inheritedMethod” – is what stores the method being searched for if and when it is found. And an object of the Method class is also what’s returned by the findInheritedMethod method, which is why you can clearly see the “Method” in the method signature of findInheritedMethod. The class named “Class” is also imported and used in the example above – it’s simply used to hold class types.

There are many other things that are possible with Java Reflection – our example above is just one simple example of the many possibilities. With Reflection, we can also invoke methods, constructors, set fields, and do many other things. The point of the example above is to give you an idea of what Java Reflection is all about. A very high level description is that Reflection allows you to get information about any particular class object, and also allows you to manipulate that information.

Is Java reflection slow and/or expensive? What are some drawbacks of reflection in Java?

One of the main drawbacks of reflection in Java is the fact that Reflection can slow down performance because reflection involves types that are resolved at run-time – and not at compile time. In our example above, note how the findInheritedMethod method accepts a “Class” type as one of its parameters – clearly, at run time that parameter will be a concrete class when the method is actually invoked, but at compile time we do not know what class will be passed for that method parameter. Because a lot of the JVM optimizations are performed at compile time, this means that portions of code that use reflection will run slower than if that same code did not contain “reflective” code. For this reason, reflection should be avoided in sections of code that are important in applications that need to be very efficient in their performance.

Reflection exposes the internals of a class

Another drawback of reflection is the fact that code which uses reflection can basically access information that is usually not allowed in non-reflexive code. For instance, reflection allows you to access private methods and fields in a class that would otherwise be inaccessible in non-reflective code, and that could potentially ruin the code or make it non-portable.

What are some practical uses of Java reflection?

One of the more common uses of Java reflection is with JUnit, which is a popular unit testing framework for Java. One commonly used feature of JUnit uses annotations to mark certain methods as test methods that which are meant to help you test your Java code. Then, when you actually decide to run your unit tests, JUnit will look for the methods which you marked with the “@Test” annotation, and will execute those methods.

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