Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition

Name

Package java.lang.reflect

Synopsis

The java.lang.reflect package contains the classes and interfaces that, along with java.lang.Class, comprise the Java Reflection API.

The Constructor, Field, and Method classes represent the constructors, fields, and methods of a class. Because these types all represent members of a class, they each implement the Member interface, which defines a simple set of methods that can be invoked for any class member. These classes allow information about the class members to be obtained, methods and constructors to be invoked, and fields to be queried and set.

Class member modifiers are represented as integers that specify a number of bit flags. The Modifier class defines static methods that help interpret the meanings of these flags. The Array class defines static methods for creating arrays and reading and writing array elements.

As of Java 1.3, the Proxy class allows the dynamic creation of new Java classes that implement a specified set of interfaces. When an interface method is invoked on an instance of such a proxy class, the invocation is delegated to an InvocationHandler object.

There have been a number of changes to this package to support the new language features of Java 5.0. The most important changes are support for querying the generic signature of classes, methods, constructors, and fields. Class, Method and Constructor implement the new GenericDeclaration interface, which provides access to the TypeVariable declarations of generic ...