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 ...
Get Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.