Java Reflection and the pain in Refactoring

Question

Java Reflection provides a mechanism to introspect an Object at runtime. No second thoughts, this is a great feature, but it breaks all the Refactoring conventions!

Ther

Answer 1

Java reflection causes many of the same problems you get with dynamically typed languages such as Python and Ruby. In fact, one way to think about dynamically typed languages is that everything is called using reflection, and the languages just provide a nice, clean syntax for reflection.

And yes, with dynamically typed languages (or heavy uses of reflection), refactoring is hard. You don't get the nice Eclipse refactoring capabilities. Instead, grep becomes your friend.

From my experience, the best thing you can do is build yourself a good safety net of unit tests. That way, if you break some dynamic code during refactoring, at least you'll catch it quickly when you run the tests.

If you're doing lots of statically typed code, you're in big trouble if you don't have a good base of unit tests. If you're doing lots of dynamically typed code (including code with lots of reflection), you don't have any hope of being successful without a good base of unit tests.