Reflection is heavily utilized in a library or framework.Using reflection we can even access the properties and functions marked with the private access-modifier.Reflection enables us to introspect or manipulate the behavior of a class or interface at runtime.In the shown code-snippet we have modified the value of the property before the getter actually accessed it. Manipulate the class/interface as necessary.Find out whether any member of that class has been annotated with some particular annotations.Access the properties or functions of the class irrespective of the access-modifier.
In a nutshell, reflection enables you to reference statically defined classes, functions, or interfaces at runtime.
Since reflection is a slower process as compared to the other primitive programming stuff the frameworks would implement intermediate compilers. Who knows you might be building a bleeding-edge framework, that solves many problems of those that are in existence right now, in the upcoming years or so.ĭisclaimer: Keep in your mind that most frameworks or libraries will not always be using reflection for everything. Although, getting a high-level glimpse of how these frameworks function under the hood would, of course, augment your development toolbox. It is crucial for a developer to be able to appreciate abstraction. I understand that you are not always supposed to dig into the details of a library.
Java reflection set private field code#
In this article, I would attempt to demystify reflection through a few trivial code examples. This is precisely what reflection is built for. There must be some mechanism built into these languages that allow playing with the statically defined classes and interfaces at runtime.
However, it is really not obvious that how do these libraries know what you defined or exactly where you did that. You extend some classes such as Main-Activity or ViewModel and the end result is a functioning app. In libraries like Retrofit or Kotlin-serialization, you define a bunch of classes or interfaces and annotate them with some predefined keywords and it works perfectly in the runtime. Have you ever wondered how the libraries or frameworks, that rely on the JVM-based languages such as Kotlin or Java, work under the hood? To me, it had been some sort of black magic unless I came across the idea of reflection.
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