Programming Groovy 2

10.6 Calling Groovy Dynamic Methods from Java

In Groovy we can create methods at runtime, as we’ll see in Part 3, ​MOPping Groovy​. We can’t directly call these methods from Java, because at compile time these methods don’t exist in the bytecode. They come to life at runtime, but if we’re calling them from Java we’d write the calls at compile time (or use reflection). To invoke the dynamic methods, we have to get past the Java compiler so the runtime can do the dispatching. That sounds complicated, but we can rely on Groovy!

Every Groovy object implements the ​GroovyObject​ interface, which has a special method named ​invokeMethod​ . This method accepts the name of the method to invoke and the arguments to pass. We can use the ​invokeMethod ...