Trying to use Kotlin for an app utilizing Apache Beam, and I get the warning that:
#ProcessElement processElement(String, OutputReceiver), parameter of type DoFn.OutputReceiver<Map<String, String>> at index 1: OutputReceiver should be parameterized by java.util.Map<java.lang.String, ? extends java.lang.String>
I'm assuming somewhere in the implementation they use reflection to determine the specific type being used; is there a way to work with this cleanly in Kotlin? Or would I need to create a wrapper around such functions to do the conversion?
It's hard to respond without seeing the entire class but I think you can avoid wrapper by importing java map with the alias as
import java.util.Map as JavaMap
and then return a JavaMap
The internal apache beam reflection considers only java collection types so a case like this one can happen also with Iterables or Collection etc..
I`m new at kotlin and want to build a multiplatform application.
For the common part I want to use data classes that contains platform specific functions.
Is it possible to use the kotlin data class in a platform specific declaration?
something like
expect data class Foo(val bar: String)
best regards
From Kotlin's docs on Platform Specific Declarations:
Expected declarations never contain any implementation code.
Since data classes generate implementations they can't be used in expect declarations. The actual implementation can be a data class since it does not change the semantics of the declared class.
expect class Some {}
actual data class Some(val test: UUID)
I'm trying to solve the problem of serializing and deserializing Box<SomeTrait>. I know that in the case of a closed type hierarchy, the recommended way is to use an enum and there are no issues with their serialization, but in my case using enums is an inappropriate solution.
At first I tried to use Serde as it is the de-facto Rust serialization mechanism. Serde is capable of serializing Box<X> but not in the case when X is a trait. The Serialize trait can’t be implemented for trait objects because it has generic methods. This particular issue can be solved by using erased-serde so serialization of Box<SomeTrait> can work.
The main problem is deserialization. To deserialize polymorphic type you need to have some type marker in serialized data. This marker should be deserialized first and after that used to dynamically get the function that will return Box<SomeTrait>.
std::any::TypeId could be used as a marker type, but the main problem is how to dynamically get the deserialization function. I do not consider the option of registering a function for each polymorphic type that should be called manually during application initialization.
I know two possible ways to do it:
Languages that have runtime reflection like C# can use it to get
deserialization method.
In C++, the cereal library uses magic of static objects to register deserializer in a static map at the library initialization time.
But neither of these options is available in Rust. How can deserialization of polymorphic objects be added in Rust if at all?
This has been implemented by dtolnay.
The concept is quite clever ans is explained in the README:
How does it work?
We use the inventory crate to produce a registry of impls of your trait, which is built on the ctor crate to hook up initialization functions that insert into the registry. The first Box<dyn Trait> deserialization will perform the work of iterating the registry and building a map of tags to deserialization functions. Subsequent deserializations find the right deserialization function in that map. The erased-serde crate is also involved, to do this all in a way that does not break object safety.
To summarize, every implementation of the trait declared as [de]serializable is registered at compile-time, and this is resolved at runtime in case of [de]serialization of a trait object.
All your libraries could provide a registration routine, guarded by std::sync::Once, that register some identifier into a common static mut, but obviously your program must call them all.
I've no idea if TypeId yields consistent values across recompiles with different dependencies.
A library to do this should be possible. To create such a library, we would create a bidirectional mapping from TypeId to type name before using the library, and then use that for serialization/deserialization with a type marker. It would be possible to have a function for registering types that are not owned by your package, and to provide a macro annotation that automatically does this for types declared in your package.
If there's a way to access a type ID in a macro, that would be a good way to instrument the mapping between TypeId and type name at compile time rather than runtime.
I'd like to write a plugin for Intellij IDEA that should modify a Java and Kotlin code.
I use the method
PsiClass.getMethods()
in order to get all methods of Java and Kotlin classes. So far so good, so then I use methods like
PsiClass.add(), PsiClass.addAfter(), PsiClass.addBefore()
that all work fine once they are called on Java files, but start to throw an exception
IncorrectOperationException
once I called them on a Kotlin class.
I'd appreciate any hint on how I can modify Kotlin and Java classes (preferably using the same approach).
When you search for a Kotlin class via the JavaPsiFacade, it returns the light class which is a shallow representation that is just based on the information in the class file. In order to add PSI elements, you have to call navigationElement on it. Then, IJ will parse the source and build a full PSI tree that can be modified.
However, if the class is a Kotlin class, navigationElement will return a KtClass which is not derived from PsiClass. You will have to use the facilities in the Kotlin hierarchy to modify it. Method instances in Kotlin are also not instances of PsiMethod, but instances of KtMethod.
For analyzing Java and Kotlin sources in a common fashion there is a different syntax tree called "UAST", but for modifications you need a language-specific approach.
This question already has answers here:
What is reflection and why is it useful?
(23 answers)
Closed 6 years ago.
I was just curious, why should we use reflection in the first place?
// Without reflection
Foo foo = new Foo();
foo.hello();
// With reflection
Class cls = Class.forName("Foo");
Object foo = cls.newInstance();
Method method = cls.getMethod("hello", null);
method.invoke(foo, null);
We can simply create an object and call the class's method, but why do the same using forName, newInstance and getMthod functions?
To make everything dynamic?
Simply put: because sometimes you don't know either the "Foo" or "hello" parts at compile time.
The vast majority of the time you do know this, so it's not worth using reflection. Just occasionally, however, you don't - and at that point, reflection is all you can turn to.
As an example, protocol buffers allows you to generate code which either contains full statically-typed code for reading and writing messages, or it generates just enough so that the rest can be done by reflection: in the reflection case, the load/save code has to get and set properties via reflection - it knows the names of the properties involved due to the message descriptor. This is much (much) slower but results in considerably less code being generated.
Another example would be dependency injection, where the names of the types used for the dependencies are often provided in configuration files: the DI framework then has to use reflection to construct all the components involved, finding constructors and/or properties along the way.
It is used whenever you (=your method/your class) doesn't know at compile time the type should instantiate or the method it should invoke.
Also, many frameworks use reflection to analyze and use your objects. For example:
hibernate/nhibernate (and any object-relational mapper) use reflection to inspect all the properties of your classes so that it is able to update them or use them when executing database operations
you may want to make it configurable which method of a user-defined class is executed by default by your application. The configured value is String, and you can get the target class, get the method that has the configured name, and invoke it, without knowing it at compile time.
parsing annotations is done by reflection
A typical usage is a plug-in mechanism, which supports classes (usually implementations of interfaces) that are unknown at compile time.
You can use reflection for automating any process that could usefully use a list of the object's methods and/or properties. If you've ever spent time writing code that does roughly the same thing on each of an object's fields in turn -- the obvious way of saving and loading data often works like that -- then that's something reflection could do for you automatically.
The most common applications are probably these three:
Serialization (see, e.g., .NET's XmlSerializer)
Generation of widgets for editing objects' properties (e.g., Xcode's Interface Builder, .NET's dialog designer)
Factories that create objects with arbitrary dependencies by examining the classes for constructors and supplying suitable objects on creation (e.g., any dependency injection framework)
Using reflection, you can very easily write configurations that detail methods/fields in text, and the framework using these can read a text description of the field and find the real corresponding field.
e.g. JXPath allows you to navigate objects like this:
//company[#name='Sun']/address
so JXPath will look for a method getCompany() (corresponding to company), a field in that called name etc.
You'll find this in lots of frameworks in Java e.g. JavaBeans, Spring etc.
It's useful for things like serialization and object-relational mapping. You can write a generic function to serialize an object by using reflection to get all of an object's properties. In C++, you'd have to write a separate function for every class.
I have used it in some validation classes before, where I passed a large, complex data structure in the constructor and then ran a zillion (couple hundred really) methods to check the validity of the data. All of my validation methods were private and returned booleans so I made one "validate" method you could call which used reflection to invoke all the private methods in the class than returned booleans.
This made the validate method more concise (didn't need to enumerate each little method) and garuanteed all the methods were being run (e.g. someone writes a new validation rule and forgets to call it in the main method).
After changing to use reflection I didn't notice any meaningful loss in performance, and the code was easier to maintain.
in addition to Jons answer, another usage is to be able to "dip your toe in the water" to test if a given facility is present in the JVM.
Under OS X a java application looks nicer if some Apple-provided classes are called. The easiest way to test if these classes are present, is to test with reflection first
some times you need to create a object of class on fly or from some other place not a java code (e.g jsp). at that time reflection is useful.