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
This is a big topic. The Spring reference doc devotes multiple chapters to it. I recommend reading the ones on Aspect-Oriented Programming and Transactions, as Spring's declarative transaction support uses AOP at its foundation.
But at a very high level, Spring creates proxies for classes that declare
@Transactional
on the class itself or on members. The proxy is mostly invisible at runtime. It provides a way for Spring to inject behaviors before, after, or around method calls into the object being proxied. Transaction management is just one example of the behaviors that can be hooked in. Security checks are another. And you can provide your own, too, for things like logging. So when you annotate a method with@Transactional
, Spring dynamically creates a proxy that implements the same interface(s) as the class you're annotating. And when clients make calls into your object, the calls are intercepted and the behaviors injected via the proxy mechanism.Transactions in EJB work similarly, by the way.
As you observed, through, the proxy mechanism only works when calls come in from some external object. When you make an internal call within the object, you're really making a call through the
this
reference, which bypasses the proxy. There are ways of working around that problem, however. I explain one approach in this forum post in which I use aBeanFactoryPostProcessor
to inject an instance of the proxy into "self-referencing" classes at runtime. I save this reference to a member variable calledme
. Then if I need to make internal calls that require a change in the transaction status of the thread, I direct the call through the proxy (e.g.me.someMethod()
.) The forum post explains in more detail.Note that the
BeanFactoryPostProcessor
code would be a little different now, as it was written back in the Spring 1.x timeframe. But hopefully it gives you an idea. I have an updated version that I could probably make available.