Depth in Java

Depth in Java

utility of introspection

One of Java's strengths is that it was designed with the assumption that the environment in which it was running would be changing dynamically. Classes are loaded dynamically, binding is done dynamically, and object instances are created dynamically on the fly when they are needed. What has not been very dynamic historically is the ability to manipulate "anonymous" classes. In this context, an anonymous class is one that is loaded or presented to a Java class at run time and whose type was previously unknown to the Java program.

Anonymous classes

Supporting anonymous classes is hard to explain and even harder to design for in a program. The challenge of supporting an anonymous class can be stated like this: "Write a program that, when given a Java object, can incorporate that object into its continuing operation." The general solution is rather difficult, but by constraining the problem, some specialized solutions can be created. There are two examples of specialized solutions to this class of problem in the 1.0 version of Java: Java applets and the command-line version of the Java interpreter.

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