Component Development for the Java™ Platform

3.3. Reflective Invocation

The Reflection API's ability to report the fields, methods, and constructors of a class is a very useful feature for the authors of Java development environments. For example, Java IDE wizards can automatically generate empty implementations of an interface for you to fill in. Java reflection makes this simple, whereas with many other languages, the development environment must build its own custom metadata representation to provide these services. While reflective reporting is a nifty parlor trick, the real power of reflection lies elsewhere, in the invocation APIs. With reflective invocation, you can access or change the value of a field and you can even invoke a method without any compile-time knowledge of the classes ...