Artem Konovalov

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Code generation at runtime

📅 05 Dec 2019 🕑 4 min read

code generation at runtime

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

At some points, we need to generate classes with a particular implementation. Unfortunately, Java is not as so dynamic as Groovy, JavaScript or Python. Anyway, there are several ways for doing it. One of them is generating bytecode outright but this way is sophisticated.

In this article we consider another way. It involves four steps:

  1. to write java code
  2. to compile
  3. to load
  4. to execute.

The standard java library contains javax.tools.JavaCompiler class. We need it to compile code. The method below does it and stores a class in a temp directory. It returns the path to the compiled class.

private static String compile(String className, String code) throws Exception {
    JavaCompiler compiler = ToolProvider.getSystemJavaCompiler();
    StandardJavaFileManager fileManager = compiler.getStandardFileManager(null, null, null);
    Path output = Files.createTempDirectory("_" + System.currentTimeMillis());

    JavaCompiler.CompilationTask task = compiler
                .getTask(null,
                        fileManager,
                        null,
                        Arrays.asList("-d", output.toAbsolutePath().toString()),
                        null,
                        singletonList(new JavaSourceFromString(className, code))
                );

    boolean result = task.call();
    if(!result) throw new IllegalStateException("something wrong happened");

    return output.toAbsolutePath().toString();
}

As you can see, method getTask takes a collection of objects as the last parameter. These objects are resources contain information where source code can be gathered. For instance, it can be a file or something else.

Unfortunately, there is no implementation for simple string resources, so we can do it on our own.

private static class JavaSourceFromString extends SimpleJavaFileObject {
     private final String code;

     private JavaSourceFromString(String name, String code) {
          super(URI.create("string:///" + name.replace('.', '/') + Kind.SOURCE.extension), Kind.SOURCE);
          this.code = code;
     }

     public CharSequence getCharContent(boolean ignoreEncodingErrors) {
           return code;
     }
}

When we have a compiled class, we should load it with a class loader:

private static ClassLoader getClassLoader(String classPath) throws Exception {
  return new URLClassLoader(
                new URL[]{Paths
                        .get(classPath)
                        .toUri()
                        .toURL()
                },
                null);
}

After it, having ClassLoader, we can create a new object with type Class<?>. The class is not defined in compile time, so we can’t invoke any methods except listed in java.lang.Object directly. Thus, we should use Reflection.

private static void method(Class<?> type, String methodName) throws Exception {
    Method method = type.getDeclaredMethod(methodName);
    method.setAccessible(true);
    System.out.println(method.invoke(type.newInstance()));
}

The code below creates two new classes with the same name ru.izebit.Person. These classes have a method say with different implementation. After loading the classes, it invokes these methods.

ClassLoader classLoader = CustomCompiler.getClassLoader("ru.izebit.Person",
                        "package ru.izebit;\n" +
                        "public class Person {\n" +
                        "    public String say() {\n" +
                        "        return \"i am happy 🤠\";\n" +
                        "    }\n" +
                        "}");

method(classLoader.loadClass("ru.izebit.Person"), "say");

classLoader = CustomCompiler.getClassLoader("ru.izebit.Person",
                        "package ru.izebit;\n" +
                        "public class Person {\n" +
                        "    public String say() {\n" +
                        "        return \"i am tired 😫 \";\n" +
                        "    }\n" +
                        "}");
method(classLoader.loadClass("ru.izebit.Person"), "say");

I would like to notice, that despite having the same names, the program works without any errors. There is no collision because of using different class loaders.
The result of work is below:

i am happy 🤠
i am tired 😫

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