Advanced java articles at IBM developerworks

Foreword
Don't read the article further if you never have had any interest in programming


I am often surprised by the fact that being a Techie for years how rarely do I talk about technology outside the domain of work, especially when all my colleagues around are so enamored by technologies they work on that even the jokes they crack often related to the current technology that they are working on ;)

So seems this is the first article related to technology in anyway that is going to find a place on my blog. Following are links on some Dennis Sosnoski, the articles though are quite old but they explain the internal working of the java language most of which still holds true.

Classes and class loading -- This article explains the details on how classes are loaded in the JVM. The article will come as a surprise to a naive Java programmer who doesn't understand as yet what happens behind the scenes when he executes a simple Java class. It explains in details how a single class loading produces more then 200 lines of verbose code, which in a nutshell is a human readable output detailing each class which Java will load before loading your simple class.

It further goes on to explain the concepts of class loaders and with an example of the Tomcat class loader it explains the hierarchical execution of the class loaders.

Introducing reflection -- Reflection as a Java programmer will tell you is a mechanism which provides access to information about your Java classes, their methods and properties. The level of information and access that the Reflection mechanism provides you is much more then available through normal Java execution and often breaks certain rules of Java mechanism in providing the said level of access.

The brief description of the article on the site is "Reflection gives your code access to internal information for classes loaded into the JVM and allows you to write code that works with classes selected during execution, not in the source code. This makes reflection a great tool for building flexible applications. But watch out -- if used inappropriately, reflection can be costly. In Part 2 of his series on Java platform internals, software consultant Dennis Sosnoski provides an introduction to using reflection, as well as a look at some of the costs involved. You'll also find out how the Java Reflection API lets you hook into objects at run time."