I've read the Kotlin doc (https://kotlinlang.org/docs/packages.html), and I understood that, when importing a package, the package name does not need to match the folder's path that stores the package (unlike what happens in Java).
I don't have issues creating a package and importing it into other classes.
What I'd like to understand, is how the compiler can find the file to import?
For example:
if a file import animals.mammals.cats.* :
import animals.mammals.cats.*
...
the entities to import do not need to be stored in the file /animals/mammals/cats.kt, as long as the package name is "animals.mammals.cats":
package animals.mammals.cats
...
This Kotlin file could be stored in src/animals/kittens for example.
In other words, how import can locate the file/s to load since the package name does not help?
Thanks!
TL;DR: the compiler is given the paths to all files to compile and to all dependencies, and therefore knows about all available packages and the declarations they contain.
First, note that the import statement itself is not really the most important. It's just a convenient syntax to avoid having to specify the package everywhere throughout the file. But technically you don't need to import anything to be able to use declarations from outside the current file - you can just use their fully qualified name (a.k.a FQN) which is the package name + . + the name of the declaration.
Now, on to your question. When you run the compiler, you provide the paths to the complete set of files to be compiled at the same time: you compile a module, not a single file. Therefore, it has access to all declarations in all those files and maintains its own data structures about the available classes and top-level functions, and all symbols in general. So it can store and find declarations using just their FQN. (DISCLAIMER: I'm no expert and I don't actually know how it's done internally, but I'm just guessing that conceptually it's like storing a big mapping between FQN and the information about the corresponding declaration.)
If the declaration you use is not in the set of files being compiled, it must be in one of your dependencies. You can tell the compiler about the available dependencies by specifying the list of jars containing their already compiled classes. This list of all classes available at compile time is called the compile classpath. This is why the tool you use to build your project (for instance, Gradle or your IDE) needs to know about those dependencies, so it can put their declarations on the compile classpath when calling the compiler for you. Then, just like declarations that are being compiled, the ones from the compile classpath can be easily looked up by the compiler (the path has been given to the compiler as an argument).
Now, when you actually run your compiled program, at least on the JVM, the classes required must be placed on the runtime classpath - a set of classes given to the java program. Finding those declarations while the program runs is done by classloaders. There are multiple classloaders, organized in a hierarchy, but there is no need to go into details here. Basically, each time a class is used for the first time while your program is running, one classloader will be asked to load that class into memory. There are different implementations of classloaders, but one of the most common is the URLClassLoader which is given the URLs of some jars that contain classes, and knows how to read classes from these jars into memory on-demand.
I have a scenario where I need to use a plugin as well as a static library into my xcode project. The plugin will be dynamically loaded into the system. Now, the static library is also getting used in creation of the plugin.
While executing my project I am getting a warning saying :
Class A is getting referenced from /staticLibraryPath and plugin. One of them will be used.
Please let me know, how to resolve the warning or a better way of implementing the scenario.
The issue is a name class of the two ClassA types found in both plugin and library
I assume you have control over the source of either plugin / library.
.. rename Class A in one instance to make the names not clash -- I don't think there is another way to get rid of the warning/error
I am currently experiencing a problem in my RCP application and wanted to ask, if someone stumbled over the same problem and can give me some valuable hints:
My RCP application allows plugins to provide implementations of a specific abstract class of my model (singleton) to extend my model during runtime via the update manager. I instantiate these classes via
extensionPointImplementation.createExecutableExtension(..)
after parsing the Eclipse registry. I can serialize the created instances using the default Java serialization API.
Now to the problem: The plugin trying to deserialize the objects cannot find the class implementations of the model extensions due to the fact, that there is no plugin dependency between the plugins. Nevertheless, it is not possible for me to create such a dependency which would make the idea of extending the model during runtime obsolete.
Is it possible to solve this problem by using the default Java serialization API or do I have to implement my own serialization (which parses the Eclipse registry and creates the instances via the line shown above if all necessary plugins are available, otherwise throw an exception) which might be based on the default Java serialization API (if possible I do not want to create the serialization completely by myself)?
Thanks.
You need to define a so called buddy policy.
In the bundle trying to instantiate the class add
Eclipse-BuddyPolicy: registered
to the manifest.mf.
In the bundle providing the class add
Eclipse-RegisterBuddy: <symbolic name of the bundle instantiating the class>
to the manifest.mf.
I have two frameworks in my Xcode project that both define a class with the same name (B.framework and C.framework both have a class named MyClass), resulting in a couple warnings like so:
Duplicate symbol _OBJC_METACLASS_$_MyClass originally in B.framework/B(MyClass.o) now lazily loaded from C.framework/C(MyClass.o)
Duplicate symbol _OBJC_CLASS_$_MyClass originally in B.framework/B(MyClass.o) now lazily loaded from C.framework/C(MyClass.o)
Then at run time only one of the implementations is loaded, and trying to use the other one will result in a "unrecognized selector sent to instance" because they are totally different classes (even though they have the same name).
I use one of the MyClass implementations directly in my code, but the other framework only uses its MyClass internally and I have no idea why its even exported (its not even mentioned in the frameworks header files, i used nm to view the symbols).
How can I make both frameworks work?
There's no such thing as "exported" classes in Obj-C. Or rather, there's no such thing as "non-exported" classes. This problem is precisely why the use of 2- or 3-letter prefixes on classes is strongly recommended for all Obj-C code. Your only solution (besides not using these frameworks) is to edit one (or both) of the frameworks to change the class name, or if you don't have access to the source, then you need to contact the vendor and ask them to make that change.
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.