The name reflection is used to describe code which is able to inspect other code in the same system (or itself).
For example, say you have an object of an unknown type in Java, and you would like to call a 'doSomething' method on it if one exists. Java's static typing system isn't really designed to support this unless the object conforms to a known interface, but using reflection, your code can look at the object and find out if it has a method called 'doSomething' and then call it if you want to.
So, to give you a code example of this in Java (imagine the object in question is foo) :
Method method = foo.getClass().getMethod("doSomething", null);
method.invoke(foo, null);
One very common use case in Java is the usage with annotations. JUnit 4, for example, will use reflection to look through your classes for methods tagged with the @Test annotation, and will then call them when running the unit test.
There are some good reflection examples to get you started at http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/reflect/index.html
And finally, yes, the concepts are pretty much similar in other statically typed languages which support reflection (like C#). In dynamically typed languages, the use case described above is less necessary (since the compiler will allow any method to be called on any object, failing at runtime if it does not exist), but the second case of looking for methods which are marked or work in a certain way is still common.
Update from a comment:
The ability to inspect the code in the system and see object types is
not reflection, but rather Type Introspection. Reflection is then the
ability to make modifications at runtime by making use of
introspection. The distinction is necessary here as some languages
support introspection, but do not support reflection. One such example
is C++
There are several differences between HashMap
and Hashtable
in Java:
Hashtable
is synchronized, whereas HashMap
is not. This makes HashMap
better for non-threaded applications, as unsynchronized Objects typically perform better than synchronized ones.
Hashtable
does not allow null
keys or values. HashMap
allows one null
key and any number of null
values.
One of HashMap's subclasses is LinkedHashMap
, so in the event that you'd want predictable iteration order (which is insertion order by default), you could easily swap out the HashMap
for a LinkedHashMap
. This wouldn't be as easy if you were using Hashtable
.
Since synchronization is not an issue for you, I'd recommend HashMap
. If synchronization becomes an issue, you may also look at ConcurrentHashMap
.
Best Answer
You can always refer to resources in your application directly by their JNDI name as configured in the container, but if you do so, essentially you are wiring the container-specific name into your code. This has some disadvantages, for example, if you'll ever want to change the name later for some reason, you'll need to update all the references in all your applications, and then rebuild and redeploy them.
<resource-ref>
introduces another layer of indirection: you specify the name you want to use in the web.xml, and, depending on the container, provide a binding in a container-specific configuration file.So here's what happens: let's say you want to lookup the
java:comp/env/jdbc/primaryDB
name. The container finds that web.xml has a<resource-ref>
element forjdbc/primaryDB
, so it will look into the container-specific configuration, that contains something similar to the following:Finally, it returns the object registered under the name of
jdbc/PrimaryDBInTheContainer
.The idea is that specifying resources in the web.xml has the advantage of separating the developer role from the deployer role. In other words, as a developer, you don't have to know what your required resources are actually called in production, and as the guy deploying the application, you will have a nice list of names to map to real resources.