Kotlin in Action

Chapter 10. Annotations and reflection

This chapter covers

• Applying and defining annotations
• Using reflection to introspect classes at runtime
• A real example of a Kotlin project

Up to this point, you’ve seen many features for working with classes and functions, but they all require you to specify the exact names of classes and functions you’re using as part of the program source code. In order to call a function, you need to know the class in which it was defined, as well as its name and parameter types. Annotations and reflection give you the power to go beyond that and to write code that deals with arbitrary classes that aren’t known in advance. You can use annotations to assign library-specific semantics to those classes; and reflection ...