I’ve finally found an excuse to use reflection in Java

I’ve a project here at work. I need to write a ColdFusion custom tag in Java to talk to a remote server. This tag needs to handle a bunch of different requests and responses, but putting all that code in the one class would be a bit messy, and then there’s the problem of what happens when I need to add new handler code to it.

So I’m using this as an excuse to use the Java Reflection API for the first time. It’s going to make the job of implementing all this much simpler, and I’m not just doing it just because I can.

The handlers simply register themselves with the tag class, which acts as a dispatcher, informing it of who it is (with a Class object), and what message it can handle. Then when the tag gets a request or needs to handle a response, it simply looks up the message to get back the corresponding class, and creates and instance (though I might do pooling later if I find a good reason), and pushes all the hard work onto the handler class.

This will rock!