Core Java™ 2 Volume II - Advanced Features, Seventh Edition

Bytecode Engineering

You have seen how annotations can be processed at run time or at the source code level. There is a third possibility: processing at the bytecode level. Unless annotations are removed at the source level, they are present in the class files. The class file format is documented (see http://java.sun.com/docs/books/vmspec). The format is rather complex, and it would be challenging to process class files without special libraries. One such library is BCEL, the Bytecode Engineering Library, available at http://jakarta.apache.org/bcel.

In this section, we use BCEL to add logging messages to annotated methods. If a method is annotated with

@LogEntry(logger=loggerName)

then we add the bytecodes for the following statement at the beginning ...