Make agents, not frameworks

Ever since their introduction, Java annotations have become an integral part of the APIs of larger application frameworks. Good examples for such APIs are those of Spring or Hibernate where adding a few lines of annotation code implements quite complex program logic. And while one can argue about the drawbacks of these particular APIs, most developers would agree that this form of declarative programming is quite expressive when used right. However, only few developers choose to implement annotation-based APIs for their own frameworks or application middleware, mainly because they are regarded as difficult to realize. In the following article, I want to convince you that such APIs are in contrast quite trivial to implement and, using the right tools, do not require any special knowledge of Java intrinsics.

One problem that becomes quite obvious when implementing an annotation-based API is that annotations are not being handled by an executing Java runtime. As a consequence, it is not possible to assign a specific meaning to a given user annotation. For example, consider that we wanted to define a @Log annotation which we want to provide for simply logging each invocation of an annotated method:

class Service {
  @Log
  void doSomething() { 
    // do something ...
  }
}

As the @Log annotation is not capable of executing program logic by its mere existence, it would be up to the annotation's user to perform the requested logging. Obviously, this renders the annotation almost useless as we cannot invoke the doSomething method and expect to observe a corresponding statement in our log. So far, the annotation only serves as a marker without contributing any program logic.

Bridging the gap

In order to overcome this glaring limitation, many annotation-driven frameworks use subclassing in combination with method overriding to implement the logic that is associated with a particular annotation. This is commonly referred to as subclass instrumentation. For the proposed @Log annotation, subclass instrumentation would result in creating a class similar to the following LoggingService:

class LoggingService extends Service {
  @Override
  void doSomething() { 
    Logger.log("doSomething() was called");
    super.doSomething();
  }
}

Of course, the above class does not normally need to be implemented explicitly. Instead, it is a popular approach to generate such classes only at runtime using a code generation library such as cglib or Javassist. Both these libraries offer simple APIs for creating program enhancing subclasses. As a nice side effect of delaying the class's creation until runtime, the proposed logging framework would be usable without any specific preparation and would always stay in sync with the user's code. Neither would be the case if the class would be created in a more explicit manner, for example by writing a Java source file during a build process.

But, does it scale?

However, this solution brings along another drawback. By placing the annotation's logic into the generated subclass, one must not longer instantiate the example Service class by its constructor. Otherwise, invocations of annotated methods would still not be logged: Obviously, calling the constructor does not create an instance of the required subclass. And to make things worse - when using the suggested approach of runtime generation - the LoggingService cannot be instantiated directly either as the Java compiler does not know about the runtime-generated class.

For this reason, frameworks such as Spring or Hibernate use object factories and do not allow for direct instantiation of objects that are considered to be a part of their framework logic. With Spring, creating objects by a factory comes naturally as all of Spring's objects are already managed beans which are to be created by the framework in the first place. Similarly, most Hibernate entities are created as a result of a query and are thus not instantiated explicitly. However, when for example saving an entity instance that is not yet represented in the database, a user of Hibernate needs to substitute a recently saved instance with an instance that is returned from Hibernate after storage. From looking at questions on Hibernate, ignoring this substitution already renders a common beginner's mistake. Other than that, thanks to these factories in place, subclass instrumentation happens mostly transparent to a framework user because Java's type system implies that a subclass can substitute any of its super classes. Hence, an instance of LoggingService can be used everywhere a user would expect an instance of the user-defined Service class.

Unfortunately, this approved method of instance factories proves difficult for implementing the proposed @Log annotation as this would entail using a factory for every single instance of a potentially annotated class. Obviously, this would add a tremendous amount of boilerplate code. Probably, we would even create more boilerplate than we avoid by not hard-coding the logging instruction into the methods. Also, the accidental use of a constructor would introduce subtle bugs to a Java program because the annotations on such instances would not longer be treated as we expect them to be. As another problem, factories are not easily composable. What if we wanted to add a @Log annotation to a class that already is a Hibernate bean? This sounds trivial but would require extensive configuration to merge both framework's factories. And finally, the resulting, factory-bloated code would not turn out too pretty to read and migrations to using the framework would be costly to implement. This is where instrumentation with Java agents comes into place. This underestimated form of instrumentation offers a great alternative to the discussed subclass instrumentation.

A simple agent

A Java agent is represented by a simple jar file. Similarly to normal Java programs, Java agents define some class as an entry point. This class is then expected to define a static method which is invoked before the actual Java program's main method is called:

class MyAgent {
  public static void premain(String args, Instrumentation inst) {
    // implement agent here ...
  }
}

The most interesting part when dealing with Java agents is the premain method's second argument which represents an instance of the Instrumentation interface. This interface offers a way of hooking into Java's class loading process by defining a ClassFileTransformer. With such transformers, we are able to enhance any class of a Java program before its first use.

While using this API might sound straight forward at first, it imposes a new challenge. Class file transformations are executed by altering compiled Java classes which are represented as Java byte code. As a matter of fact, the Java virtual machine has no notion of what Java, the programming language is. Instead, it only deals with this byte code. And it is also thanks to this byte code abstraction that the JVM is easily capable of running other languages such as Scala or Groovy. As a consequence, a registered class file transformer only offers to transform a given byte (code) array into another one.

Even though libraries such as ASM or BCEL offer an easy API for manipulating compiled Java classes, only few developers are experienced in working with raw byte code. To make things worse, getting byte code manipulation right is often cumbersome and even small mistakes are redeemed by the virtual machine with throwing a nasty and unrecoverable VerifierError. Fortunately, there are better, easier ways to manipulate byte code.

Byte Buddy, a library that I wrote and maintain, provides a simple API both for manipulating compiled Java classes and for creating Java agents. In some aspects, Byte Buddy is a code generation library similar to cglib and Javassist. However, other than those libraries, Byte Buddy offers a unified API for implementing subclasses and for redefining existing classes. For this article, we do however only want to look into redefining a class using a Java agent. Curious readers are referred to Byte Buddy's webpage which offers a detailed tutorial on its full feature set.

Using Byte Buddy for a simple agent

One way that Byte Buddy offers for defining an instrumentation, is using dependency injection. Doing so, an interceptor class - which is represented by any plain old Java object - simply requests any required information by annotations on its parameters. For example, by using Byte Buddy's @Origin annotation on a parameter of the Method type, Byte Buddy deducts that the interceptor wants to know about the method that is being intercepted. This way, we can define a generic interceptor that is always aware of the method that is being intercepted:

class LogInterceptor {
  static void log(@Origin Method method) {
    Logger.log(method + " was called");
  } 
}

Of course, Byte Buddy ships with many more annotations.

But how does this interceptor represent the logic that we intended for the proposed logging framework? So far, we only defined an interceptor that is logging the method call. What we miss is the subsequent invocation of the original code of the method. Fortunately, Byte Buddy's instrumentations are composable. First, we define a MethodDelegation to the recently defined LogInterceptor which by default invokes the interceptor's static method on every call of a method. Starting from this, we can then compose the delegation with a subsequent call of the original method's code which is represented by SuperMethodCall:

MethodDelegation.to(LogInterceptor.class)
  .andThen(SuperMethodCall.INSTANCE)

Finally, we need to inform Byte Buddy on the methods that are to be intercepted by the specified instrumentation. As we explained before, we want this instrumentation to apply for any method that is annotated with @Log. Within Byte Buddy, such a property of a method can be identified using an ElementMatcher which is similar to a Java 8 predicate. In the static utility class ElementMatchers, we can already find a suitable matcher for identifying methods with a given annotation: ElementMatchers.isAnnotatedWith(Log.class).

With all this, we can now define an agent that implements the suggested logging framework. For Java agents, Byte Buddy provides a utility API that builds on the class modification API that we just discussed. Similarly to this latter API, it is designed as a domain specific language such that its meaning should be easily understood only by looking at the implementation. As we can see, defining such an agent only requires a few lines of code:

class LogAgent {
  public static void premain(String args, Instrumentation inst) {
    new AgentBuilder.Default()
      .rebase(ElementMatchers.any())
      .transform( builder -> return builder
                              .method(ElementMatchers.isAnnotatedWith(Log.class))
                              .intercept(MethodDelegation.to(LogInterceptor.class)
                                  .andThen(SuperMethodCall.INSTANCE)) )
      .installOn(inst);
  }
}

Note that this minimal Java agent would not interfere with the remainder of the application as any executing code observes the instrumented Java classes just as if the logging statement was hard-coded into any annotated method.

What about real life?

Of course the presented agent-based logger is a trivial example. And often, broadly-scoped frameworks that offer similar features out-of-the-box such for example Spring or Dropwizard are great. However, such frameworks are equally often opinionated about how to approach programming problems. For a large number of software applications, this might not be a problem. And yet, sometimes these opinions are in the way of something bigger. Then, working around a framework's assumption on how to do things can cause more than just a few problems, often causes leaky abstractions and might just result in exploding costs for software maintenance. This is true especially when applications grow and change over time and diverge in their needs from what an underlying framework offers.

In contrast, when composing more specialized frameworks or libraries in a pic n mix fashion, one simply replaces problematic components with another one. And if this does not work either, one can even implement a custom solution without interfering with the rest of the application. As we learned, this seems difficult to realize on the JVM, mainly as a consequence of Java's strict type system. Using Java agents, it is however very much possible to overcome these typing constraints.

I came to the point where I believe that at least any cross-cutting concern should be covered by an agent-driven, specialized library instead of by a built-in module of a monolithic framework. And I really wish more applications would consider this approach. In the most trivial case, it is enough to use an agent to register listeners on methods of interest and to take it from there. This indirect approach of composing code modules avoids the strong cohesion that I observe in a large fraction of the Java applications I come across. As a nice side effect, It also makes testing very easy. And similarly to running tests, not adding an agent when starting up an application, allows to pointedly disable a certain application feature like for example logging. All this without changing a line of code and without crashing the application as the JVM simply ignores annotations that it cannot resolve at runtime. Security, logging, caching, there are many reasons that these topics and more should be taken care of in the suggested manner. Therefore, sometimes, make agents, not frameworks.

Java 8 default methods can break your (users') code

At first glance, default methods brought a great new feature to the Java Virtual Machine's instruction set. Finally, library developers are able to evolve established APIs without introducing incompatibilities to their user's code. Using default methods, any user class that implements a library interface automatically adopts the default code when a new method is introduced to this interface. And once a user updates his implementing classes, he can simply override the default with something more meaningful to his particular use case. Even better, the user can call the default implementation of the interface from the overridden method and add logic around it.

So far, so good. However, adding default methods to established interfaces can render Java code uncompilable. This is easiest to understand when looking at an example. Let us assume a library that requires a class of one of its interfaces as its input:

interface SimpleInput {
  void foo();
  void bar();
}

abstract class SimpleInputAdapter implements SimpleInput {
  @Override
  public void bar() {
    // some default behavior ...
  }
}

Prior to Java 8, the above combination of an interface and a corresponding adapter class is a rather common pattern in the Java programming language. The adapter is usually offered by the library supplier to save the library's users some typing. However, the interface is offered additionally in order to allow an approximation of multiple inheritance.

Let us further assume that a user made use of this adapter:

class MyInput extends SimpleInputAdapter {
  @Override
  public void foo() {
    // do something ...
  }
  @Override
  public void bar() {
    super.bar();
    // do something additionally ...
  }
}

With this implementation, the user can finally interact with the library. Note how the implementation overrides the bar method to add some functionality to the default implementation.

So what happens if the library migrates to Java 8? First of all, the library will most likely deprecate the adapter class and move the functionality to default methods. As a result, the interface will now look like this:

interface SimpleInput {
  void foo();
  default void bar() {
    // some default behavior
  }
}

With this new interface, a user can update his code to adapt the default method instead of using the adapter class. The great thing about using interfaces instead of adapter classes is the ability to extend another class than the particular adapter. Let's put this into action and migrate the MyInput class to use the default method instead. Because we can now extend another class, let us additionally extend some third party base class. What this base class does is not of particular relevance here, so let us just assume that this makes sense for our use-case.

class MyInput extends ThirdPartyBaseClass implements SimpleInput {
  @Override
  public void foo() {
    // do something ...
  }
  @Override
  public void bar() {
    SimpleInput.super.bar();
    // do something additionally ... 
  }
}

To implement similar behavior as in the original class, we make use of Java 8's new syntax for calling a default method of a specific interface. Also, we moved the logic for myMethod to some base class MyBase. Clap on our shoulders. Nice refactoring here!

The library we are using is a great success. However, the maintainer needs to add another interface to offer more functionality. This interface represents a ComplexInput which extends the SimpleInput with an additional method. Because default methods are in general considered as being safe to add, the maintainer additionally overrides the SimpleInput's default method and adds some behavior to offer a better default. After all, doing so was quite common when implementing adapter classes:

interface ComplexInput extends SimpleInput {
  void qux();
  @Override
  default void bar() {
    SimpleInput.super.bar(); 
    // so complex, we need to do more ...
  }
} 

This new feature turns out so great that the maintainer of the ThirdPartyBaseClass decided to also rely on this library. For making this work, he implements the ComplexInput interface for the ThirdPartyLibrary.

But what does that mean to the MyInput class? Due to the implicit implementation of ComplexInput by extending ThirdPartyBaseClass, calling the default method of SimpleInput has suddenly become illegal. As a result, the user's code does not longer compile. Also, it is now generally forbidden to call this method since Java sees this call as illegal as calling a super-super method of an indirect super class. Instead, you could call the default method of the ComplexInput class. However, this would require you to first explicitly implement this interface in MyInput. For the user of the library, this change comes most likely rather unexpected!

Oddly enough, the Java runtime does not make this distinction. The JVM's verifier will allow a compiled class to call SimpleInput::foo even if the loaded class at run time implicitly implements the ComplexClass by extending the updated version of ThirdPartyBaseClass. It is only the compiler that complains here.

But what do we learn from this? In a nutshell, make sure to never override a default method in another interface. Neither with another default method, nor with an abstract method. In general, be careful about using default methods at all. As much as they ease the evolution of established APIs as Java's collection interfaces, they are intrinsically complex by allowing to perform method invocations that go sideways in your type hierarchy. Before Java 7, you would only need to look for the actually invoked code by traversing down a linear class hierarchy. Only add this complexity when you really feel it is absolutely necessary.

The infamous sun.misc.Unsafe explained

The biggest competitor to the Java virtual machine might be Microsoft's CLR that hosts languages such as C#. The CLR allows to write unsafe code as an entry gate for low level programming, something that is hard to achieve on the JVM. If you need such advanced functionality in Java, you might be forced to use the JNI which requires you to know some C and will quickly lead to code that is tightly coupled to a specific platform. With sun.misc.Unsafe, there is however another alternative to low-level programming on the Java plarform using a Java API, even though this alternative is discouraged. Nevertheless, several applications rely on sun.misc.Unsafe such for example objenesis and therewith all libraries that build on the latter such for example kryo which is again used in for example Twitter's Storm. Therefore, it is time to have a look, especially since the functionality of sun.misc.Unsafe is considered to become part of Java's public API in Java 9.

Getting hold of an instance of sun.misc.Unsafe

The sun.misc.Unsafe class is intended to be only used by core Java classes which is why its authors made its only constructor private and only added an equally private singleton instance. The public getter for this instances performs a security check in order to avoid its public use:

public static Unsafe getUnsafe() {
  Class cc = sun.reflect.Reflection.getCallerClass(2);
  if (cc.getClassLoader() != null)
    throw new SecurityException("Unsafe");
  return theUnsafe;
}

This method first looks up the calling Class from the current thread’s method stack. This lookup is implemented by another internal class named sun.reflection.Reflection which is basically browsing down the given number of call stack frames and then returns this method’s defining class. This security check is however likely to change in future version. When browsing the stack, the first found class (index 0) will obviously be the Reflection class itself, and the second (index 1) class will be the Unsafe class such that index 2 will hold your application class that was calling Unsafe#getUnsafe().

This looked-up class is then checked for its ClassLoader where a null reference is used to represent the bootstrap class loader on a HotSpot virtual machine. (This is documented in Class#getClassLoader() where it says that “some implementations may use null to represent the bootstrap class loader”.) Since no non-core Java class is normally ever loaded with this class loader, you will therefore never be able to call this method directly but receive a thrown SecurityException as an answer. (Technically, you could force the VM to load your application classes using the bootstrap class loader by adding it to the –Xbootclasspath, but this would require some setup outside of your application code which you might want to avoid.) Thus, the following test will succeed:

@Test(expected = SecurityException.class)
public void testSingletonGetter() throws Exception {
  Unsafe.getUnsafe();
}

However, the security check is poorly designed and should be seen as a warning against the singleton anti-pattern. As long as the use of reflection is not prohibited (which is hard since it is so widely used in many frameworks), you can always get hold of an instance by inspecting the private members of the class. From the Unsafe class's source code, you can learn that the singleton instance is stored in a private static field called theUnsafe. This is at least true for the HotSpot virtual machine. Unfortunately for us, other virtual machine implementations sometimes use other names for this field. Android’s Unsafe class is for example storing its singleton instance in a field called THE_ONE. This makes it hard to provide a “compatible” way of receiving the instance. However, since we already left the save territory of compatibility by using the Unsafe class, we should not worry about this more than we should worry about using the class at all. For getting hold of the singleton instance, you simply read the singleton field's value:

Field theUnsafe = Unsafe.class.getDeclaredField("theUnsafe");
theUnsafe.setAccessible(true);
Unsafe unsafe = (Unsafe) theUnsafe.get(null);

Alternatively, you can invoke the private instructor. I do personally prefer this way since it works for example with Android while extracting the field does not:

Constructor<Unsafe> unsafeConstructor = Unsafe.class.getDeclaredConstructor();
unsafeConstructor.setAccessible(true);
Unsafe unsafe = unsafeConstructor.newInstance();

The price you pay for this minor compatibility advantage is a minimal amount of heap space. The security checks performed when using reflection on fields or constructors are however similar.

 

Create an instance of a class without calling a constructor

The first time I made use of the Unsafe class was for creating an instance of a class without calling any of the class's constructors. I needed to proxy an entire class which only had a rather noisy constructor but I only wanted to delegate all method invocations to a real instance which I did however not know at the time of construction. Creating a subclass was easy and if the class had been represented by an interface, creating a proxy would have been a straight-forward task. With the expensive constructor, I was however stuck. By using the Unsafe class, I was however able to work my way around it. Consider a class with an artificially expensive constructor:

class ClassWithExpensiveConstructor {

  private final int value;

  private ClassWithExpensiveConstructor() {
    value = doExpensiveLookup();
  }

  private int doExpensiveLookup() {
    try {
      Thread.sleep(2000);
    } catch (InterruptedException e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
    return 1;
  }

  public int getValue() {
    return value;
  }
}

Using the Unsafe, we can create an instance of ClassWithExpensiveConstructor (or any of its subclasses) without having to invoke the above constructor, simply by allocating an instance directly on the heap:

@Test
public void testObjectCreation() throws Exception {
  ClassWithExpensiveConstructor instance = (ClassWithExpensiveConstructor) 
  unsafe.allocateInstance(ClassWithExpensiveConstructor.class);
  assertEquals(0, instance.getValue());
}

Note that final field remained uninitialized by the constructor but is set with its type's default value. Other than that, the constructed instance behaves like a normal Java object. It will for example be garbage collected when it becomes unreachable.

The Java run time itself creates objects without calling a constructor when for example creating objects for deserialization. Therefore, the ReflectionFactory offers even more access to individual object creation:

@Test
public void testReflectionFactory() throws Exception {
  @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
  Constructor<ClassWithExpensiveConstructor> silentConstructor = ReflectionFactory.getReflectionFactory()
      .newConstructorForSerialization(ClassWithExpensiveConstructor.class, Object.class.getConstructor());
  silentConstructor.setAccessible(true);
  assertEquals(10, silentConstructor.newInstance().getValue());
}

Note that the ReflectionFactory class only requires a RuntimePermission called reflectionFactoryAccess for receiving its singleton instance and no reflection is therefore required here. The received instance of ReflectionFactory allows you to define any constructor to become a constructor for the given type. In the example above, I used the default constructor of java.lang.Object for this purpose. You can however use any constructor:

class OtherClass {

  private final int value;
  private final int unknownValue;

  private OtherClass() {
    System.out.println("test");
    this.value = 10;
    this.unknownValue = 20;
  }
}

@Test
public void testStrangeReflectionFactory() throws Exception {
  @SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
  Constructor<ClassWithExpensiveConstructor> silentConstructor = ReflectionFactory.getReflectionFactory()
      .newConstructorForSerialization(ClassWithExpensiveConstructor.class,
            OtherClass.class.getDeclaredConstructor());
  silentConstructor.setAccessible(true);
  ClassWithExpensiveConstructor instance = silentConstructor.newInstance();
  assertEquals(10, instance.getValue());
  assertEquals(ClassWithExpensiveConstructor.class, instance.getClass());
  assertEquals(Object.class, instance.getClass().getSuperclass());
}

Note that value was set in this constructor even though the constructor of a completely different class was invoked. Non-existing fields in the target class are however ignored as also obvious from the above example. Note that OtherClass does not become part of the constructed instances type hierarchy, the OtherClass's constructor is simply borrowed for the "serialized" type.

Not mentioned in this blog entry are other methods such as Unsafe#defineClass, Unsafe#defineAnonymousClass or Unsafe#ensureClassInitialized. Similar functionality is however also defined in the public API's ClassLoader.

Native memory allocation

Did you ever want to allocate an array in Java that should have had more than Integer.MAX_VALUE entries? Probably not because this is not a common task, but if you once need this functionality, it is possible. You can create such an array by allocating native memory. Native memory allocation is used by for example direct byte buffers that are offered in Java's NIO packages. Other than heap memory, native memory is not part of the heap area and can be used non-exclusively for example for communicating with other processes. As a result, Java's heap space is in competition with the native space: the more memory you assign to the JVM, the less native memory is left.

Let us look at an example for using native (off-heap) memory in Java with creating the mentioned oversized array:

class DirectIntArray {

  private final static long INT_SIZE_IN_BYTES = 4;
  
  private final long startIndex;

  public DirectIntArray(long size) {
    startIndex = unsafe.allocateMemory(size * INT_SIZE_IN_BYTES);
    unsafe.setMemory(startIndex, size * INT_SIZE_IN_BYTES, (byte) 0);
    }
  }

  public void setValue(long index, int value) {
    unsafe.putInt(index(index), value);
  }

  public int getValue(long index) {
    return unsafe.getInt(index(index));
  }

  private long index(long offset) {
    return startIndex + offset * INT_SIZE_IN_BYTES;
  }

  public void destroy() {
    unsafe.freeMemory(startIndex);
  }
}

@Test
public void testDirectIntArray() throws Exception {
  long maximum = Integer.MAX_VALUE + 1L;
  DirectIntArray directIntArray = new DirectIntArray(maximum);
  directIntArray.setValue(0L, 10);
  directIntArray.setValue(maximum, 20);
  assertEquals(10, directIntArray.getValue(0L));
  assertEquals(20, directIntArray.getValue(maximum));
  directIntArray.destroy();
}

First, make sure that your machine has sufficient memory for running this example! You need at least (2147483647 + 1) * 4 byte = 8192 MB of native memory for running the code. If you have worked with other programming languages as for example C, direct memory allocation is something you do every day. By calling Unsafe#allocateMemory(long), the virtual machine allocates the requested amount of native memory for you. After that, it will be your responsibility to handle this memory correctly.

The amount of memory that is required for storing a specific value is dependent on the type's size. In the above example, I used an int type which represents a 32-bit integer. Consequently a single int value consumes 4 byte. For primitive types, size is well-documented. It is however more complex to compute the size of object types since they are dependent on the number of non-static fields that are declared anywhere in the type hierarchy. The most canonical way of computing an object's size is using the Instrumented class from Java's attach API which offers a dedicated method for this purpose called getObjectSize. I will however evaluate another (hacky) way of dealing with objects in the end of this section.

Be aware that directly allocated memory is always native memory and therefore not garbage collected. You therefore have to free memory explicitly as demonstrated in the above example by a call to Unsafe#freeMemory(long). Otherwise you reserved some memory that can never be used for something else as long as the JVM instance is running what is a memory leak and a common problem in non-garbage collected languages. Alternatively, you can also directly reallocate memory at a certain address by calling Unsafe#reallocateMemory(long, long) where the second argument describes the new amount of bytes to be reserved by the JVM at the given address.

Also, note that the directly allocated memory is not initialized with a certain value. In general, you will find garbage from old usages of this memory area such that you have to explicitly initialize your allocated memory if you require a default value. This is something that is normally done for you when you let the Java run time allocate the memory for you. In the above example, the entire area is overriden with zeros with help of the Unsafe#setMemory method.

When using directly allocated memory, the JVM will neither do range checks for you. It is therefore possible to corrupt your memory as this example shows:

@Test
public void testMallaciousAllocation() throws Exception {
  long address = unsafe.allocateMemory(2L * 4);
  unsafe.setMemory(address, 8L, (byte) 0);
  assertEquals(0, unsafe.getInt(address));
  assertEquals(0, unsafe.getInt(address + 4));
  unsafe.putInt(address + 1, 0xffffffff);
  assertEquals(0xffffff00, unsafe.getInt(address));
  assertEquals(0x000000ff, unsafe.getInt(address + 4));
}

Note that we wrote a value into the space that was each partly reserved for the first and for the second number. This picture might clear things up. Be aware that the values in the memory run from the "right to the left" (but this might be machine dependent).

The first row shows the initial state after writing zeros to the entire allocated native memory area. Then we override 4 byte with an offset of a single byte using 32 ones. The last row shows the result after this writing operation.

Finally, we want to write an entire object into native memory. As mentioned above, this is a difficult task since we first need to compute the size of the object in order to know the amount of size we need to reserve. The Unsafe class does however not offer such functionality. At least not directly since we can at least use the Unsafe class to find the offset of an instance's field which is used by the JVM when itself allocates objects on the heap. This allows us to find the approximate size of an object:

public long sizeOf(Class<?> clazz)
  long maximumOffset = 0;
  do {
    for (Field f : clazz.getDeclaredFields()) {
      if (!Modifier.isStatic(f.getModifiers())) {
        maximumOffset = Math.max(maximumOffset, unsafe.objectFieldOffset(f));
      }
    }
  } while ((clazz = clazz.getSuperclass()) != null);
  return maximumOffset + 8;
}

This might at first look cryptic, but there is no big secret behind this code. We simply iterate over all non-static fields that are declared in the class itself or in any of its super classes. We do not have to worry about interfaces since those cannot define fields and will therefore never alter an object's memory layout. Any of these fields has an offset which represents the first byte that is occupied by this field's value when the JVM stores an instance of this type in memory, relative to a first byte that is used for this object. We simply have to find the maximum offset in order to find the space that is required for all fields but the last field. Since a field will never occupy more than 64 bit (8 byte) for a long or double value or for an object reference when run on a 64 bit machine, we have at least found an upper bound for the space that is used to store an object. Therefore, we simply add these 8 byte to the maximum index and we will not run into danger of having reserved to little space. This idea is of course wasting some byte and a better algorithm should be used for production code.

In this context, it is best to think of a class definition as a form of heterogeneous array. Note that the minimum field offset is not 0 but a positive value. The first few byte contain meta information. The graphic below visualizes this principle for an example object with an int and a long field where both fields have an offset. Note that we do not normally write meta information when writing a copy of an object into native memory so we could further reduce the amount of used native memoy. Also note that this memory layout might be highly dependent on an implementation of the Java virtual machine.

With this overly careful estimate, we can now implement some stub methods for writing shallow copies of objects directly into native memory. Note that native memory does not really know the concept of an object. We are basically just setting a given amount of byte to values that reflect an object's current values. As long as we remember the memory layout for this type, these byte contain however enough information to reconstruct this object.

public void place(Object o, long address) throws Exception {
  Class clazz = o.getClass();
  do {
    for (Field f : clazz.getDeclaredFields()) {
      if (!Modifier.isStatic(f.getModifiers())) {
        long offset = unsafe.objectFieldOffset(f);
        if (f.getType() == long.class) {
          unsafe.putLong(address + offset, unsafe.getLong(o, offset));
        } else if (f.getType() == int.class) {
          unsafe.putInt(address + offset, unsafe.getInt(o, offset));
        } else {
          throw new UnsupportedOperationException();
        }
      }
    }
  } while ((clazz = clazz.getSuperclass()) != null);
}

public Object read(Class clazz, long address) throws Exception {
  Object instance = unsafe.allocateInstance(clazz);
  do {
    for (Field f : clazz.getDeclaredFields()) {
      if (!Modifier.isStatic(f.getModifiers())) {
        long offset = unsafe.objectFieldOffset(f);
        if (f.getType() == long.class) {
          unsafe.putLong(instance, offset, unsafe.getLong(address + offset));
        } else if (f.getType() == int.class) {
          unsafe.putLong(instance, offset, unsafe.getInt(address + offset));
        } else {
          throw new UnsupportedOperationException();
        }
      }
    }
  } while ((clazz = clazz.getSuperclass()) != null);
  return instance;
}

@Test
public void testObjectAllocation() throws Exception {
  long containerSize = sizeOf(Container.class);
  long address = unsafe.allocateMemory(containerSize);
  Container c1 = new Container(10, 1000L);
  Container c2 = new Container(5, -10L);
  place(c1, address);
  place(c2, address + containerSize);
  Container newC1 = (Container) read(Container.class, address);
  Container newC2 = (Container) read(Container.class, address + containerSize);
  assertEquals(c1, newC1);
  assertEquals(c2, newC2);
}

Note that these stub methods for writing and reading objects in native memory only support int and long field values. Of course, Unsafe supports all primitive values and can even write values without hitting thread-local caches by using the volatile forms of the methods. The stubs were only used to keep the examples concise. Be aware that these "instances" would never get garbage collected since their memory was allocated directly. (But maybe this is what you want.) Also, be careful when precalculating size since an object's memory layout might be VM dependent and also alter if a 64-bit machine runs your code compared to a 32-bit machine. The offsets might even change between JVM restarts.

For reading and writing primitives or object references, Unsafe provides the following type-dependent methods:

• getXXX(Object target, long offset): Will read a value of type XXX from target's address at the specified offset.
• putXXX(Object target, long offset, XXX value): Will place value at target's address at the specified offset.
• getXXXVolatile(Object target, long offset): Will read a value of type XXX from target's address at the specified offset and not hit any thread local caches.
• putXXXVolatile(Object target, long offset, XXX value): Will place value at target's address at the specified offset and not hit any thread local caches.
• putOrderedXXX(Object target, long offset, XXX value): Will place value at target's address at the specified offet and might not hit all thread local caches.
• putXXX(long address, XXX value): Will place the specified value of type XXX directly at the specified address.
• getXXX(long address): Will read a value of type XXX from the specified address.
• compareAndSwapXXX(Object target, long offset, long expectedValue, long value): Will atomicly read a value of type XXX from target's address at the specified offset and set the given value if the current value at this offset equals the expected value.

Be aware that you are copying references when writing or reading object copies in native memory by using the getObject(Object, long) method family. You are therefore only creating shallow copies of instances when applying the above method. You could however always read object sizes and offsets recursively and create deep copies. Pay however attention for cyclic object references which would cause infinitive loops when applying this principle carelessly.

Not mentioned here are existing utilities in the Unsafe class that allow manipulation of static field values sucht as staticFieldOffset and for handling array types. Finally, both methods named Unsafe#copyMemory allow to instruct a direct copy of memory, either relative to a specific object offset or at an absolute address as the following example shows:

@Test
public void testCopy() throws Exception {
  long address = unsafe.allocateMemory(4L);
  unsafe.putInt(address, 100);
  long otherAddress = unsafe.allocateMemory(4L);
  unsafe.copyMemory(address, otherAddress, 4L);
  assertEquals(100, unsafe.getInt(otherAddress));
}

Throwing checked exceptions without declaration

There are some other interesting methods to find in Unsafe. Did you ever want to throw a specific exception to be handled in a lower layer but you high layer interface type did not declare this checked exception? Unsafe#throwException allows to do so:

@Test(expected = Exception.class)
public void testThrowChecked() throws Exception {
  throwChecked();
}

public void throwChecked() {
  unsafe.throwException(new Exception());
}

Native concurrency

The park and unpark methods allow you to pause a thread for a certain amount of time and to resume it:

@Test
public void testPark() throws Exception {
  final boolean[] run = new boolean[1];
  Thread thread = new Thread() {
    @Override
    public void run() {
      unsafe.park(true, 100000L);
      run[0] = true;
    }
  };
  thread.start();
  unsafe.unpark(thread);
  thread.join(100L);
  assertTrue(run[0]);
}

Also, monitors can be acquired directly by using Unsafe using monitorEnter(Object), monitorExit(Object) and tryMonitorEnter(Object).

A file containing all the examples of this blog entry is available as a gist.

A declarative content parser for Java

Recently, I worked on a project that required me to parse several files which came in their own file formats. To make things worse, the file format changed quite often such that the related code had to be adjusted quite often. In my opinion, object-oriented languages such as Java are not necessarily the sharpest tools for dealing with file parsing. For this reason, I tried to solve this problem with a declarative approach, the result of which I published on GitHub and on Maven Central.

This miniature tool provides help with parsing a custom content format by creating Java beans that extract this data where each bean resembles a single row of content of a specified source. The mapping of the input to a Java bean is based on regular expressions what allows great flexibility. However, the syntax of regular expressions is enhanced by properties expressions that allow the direct mapping of bean properties within this regular expression describing these contents.
This tool is intended to be as light-weight as possible and comes without dependencies. It is however quite extensible as demonstrated below.

A simple example

The tool is used by a single entry point, an instance of BeanTransformer which can read content for a specified bean. By doing so, the parser only needs to build patterns for a specified bean a single time. Therefore, this tool performs equally good as writing native content parsers, once it is set up.
As an example for the use of this tool, imagine you want to read in data from some sample file sample.txt containing the following data in an imaginary format:

##This is a first value##foo&&2319949,
##This is a second value##bar&&741981,
##This is a third value##&&998483,

This tool would now allow you to directly translate this file by declaring the following Java bean:

@MatchBy("##@intro@##@value@&&@number@,")
class MyBean {

    private String intro;

    @OptionalMatch
    private String value;

    private int number;

    // Getters and setters...
}

The @name@ expressions each represent a property in the bean which will be filled by the data found at this particular point within the regular expression. The expression can be escaped by preceeding the first @ symbol with backslashes as for example \\@name@. A back slash can be escaped in the same manner. With calling BeanTransformer.make(MyBean.class).read(new FileReader("./sample.txt")) you would receive a list of MyBean instances where each instance resembles one line of the file. All properties would be matched to the according property name that is declared in the bean.

Matching properties

The @MatchBy annotation can also be used for fields within a bean that is used for matching. This tool will normally discover a pattern by interpreting the type of a field that is referenced in the expression used for parsing the content. Since the @number@ expression in the example above references a field of type int, the field would be matched against the regular expression [0-9]+, representing any non-decimal number. All other primitive types and their wrapper types are also equipped with a predefined matching pattern. All other types will by default be matched by a non-greedy match-everything pattern. After extracting a property, the type of the property will be tried to be instantiated by:

• Invoking a static function with the signature valueOf(String) defined on the type.
• Using a constructor taking a single String as its argument

This default behavior can however be changed. A field can be annotated with @ResolveMatchWith which requires a subtype of a PropertyDelegate as its single argument. An instance of this class will be instantiated for transforming expressions from a string to a value and reverse. The subclass needs to override the only constructor of PropertyDelegate and accept the same types as this constructor. An optional match can be declared by annotating a field with @OptionalMatch. If no match can be made for such a field, the PropertyDelegate's setter will never be invoked (when using a custom PropertyDelegate).

Dealing with regular expressions

Always keep in mind that @MatchBy annotation take regular expressions as their arguments. Therefore, it is important to escape all special characters that are found in regular expressions such as for example .\\*,[](){}+?^$. Also, note that the default matching patterns for non-primitive types or their wrappers is non-greedy. This means that the pattern @name@ would match the line foo by only the first letter f. If you want to match the full line, you have to declare the matching expression as ^@name@$ what is the regular expression for a full line match. Be aware that using regular expressions might require you to define a @WritePattern which is described below. Using regular expressions allows you to specify matching constraints natively. Annotating a field with @MatchBy("[a-z]{1,5]") would for example allow for only matching lines where the property is represented by one to five lower case characters. Configuring mismatch handling is described below.

Writing beans

Similar to reading contents from a source, this utility allows to write a list of beans to a target. Without further configuration, the same pattern as in @MatchBy will be used for writing where the property expressions are substituted by the bean values. This can however result in distorted output since symbols of regular expressions are written as they are. Therefore, a user can define an output pattern by declaring @WritePattern. This pattern understands the same type of property expressions such as @name but does not use regular expressions. Remember that regular expressions must therefore not be escaped when a @WritePattern is specified. A property expression can however be escaped in the same manner as in a @MatchBy statement.

Handling mismatches

When a content source is parsed but a single line cannot be matched to the specified expression, the extraction will abort with throwing a TransformationException. Empty lines will however be skipped. This behavior can be configured by declaring a policy within @Skip. That way, a non-matched line can either ignored, throw an exception or be ignored for empty lines. An empty line a the end of a file is always ignored.

Builder

The BeanTransformer offers a builder which allows to specify different properties. Mostly, it allows to override properties that were declared in a specific bean such as the content pattern provided by @MatchBy, a @Skip policy or the @WritePattern. This allows the reuse of a bean for different content sources that contain the same properties but differ in their display. Also, this allows to provide a pattern at run time.

Performance considerations

All beans are constructed and accessed via field reflection. (It is therefore not required to define setters and getters for beans. A default constructor is however required. In the process, primitive types are accessed as such and not wrapped in order to avoid such overhead. Java reflection is usually considered to be slower than conventional access. However, modern JVMs such as the HotSpot JVM are efficient in detecting the repetitive use of reflection and compile such access into native byte code. Therefore, this tool should not perform worse than a hand-written matcher once the BeanTransformer is set up.

Extension points

Besides providing your own PropertyDelegates, it is possible to implement a custom IDelegationFactory which is responsible for creating (custom) PropertyDelegates for any field. The default implementation SimpleDelegationFactory provides an example for such an implementation. That way, it would be for example possible to automatically create suitable patterns for bean validation (JSR-303) annotations.

The code is licensed under the Apache Software License, Version 2.0.

cglib: The missing manual

The byte code instrumentation library cglib is a popular choice among many well-known Java frameworks such as Hibernate (not anymore) or Spring for doing their dirty work. Byte code instrumentation allows to manipulate or to create classes after the compilation phase of a Java application. Since Java classes are linked dynamically at run time, it is possible to add new classes to an already running Java program. Hibernate uses cglib for example for its generation of dynamic proxies. Instead of returning the full object that you stored ina a database, Hibernate will return you an instrumented version of your stored class that lazily loads some values from the database only when they are requested. Spring used cglib for example when adding security constraints to your method calls. Instead of calling your method directly, Spring security will first check if a specified security check passes and only delegate to your actual method after this verification. Another popular use of cglib is within mocking frameworks such as mockito, where mocks are nothing more than instrumented class where the methods were replaced with empty implementations (plus some tracking logic).

Other than ASM - another very high-level byte code manipulation library on top of which cglib is built - cglib offers rather low-level byte code transformers that can be used without even knowing about the details of a compiled Java class. Unfortunately, the documentation of cglib is rather short, not to say that there is basically none. Besides a single blog article from 2005 that demonstrates the Enhancer class, there is not much to find. This blog article is an attempt to demonstrate cglib and its unfortunately often awkward API.

Enhancer

Let's start with the Enhancer class, the probably most used class of the cglib library. An enhancer allows the creation of Java proxies for non-interface types. The Enhancer can be compared with the Java standard library's Proxy class which was introduced in Java 1.3. The Enhancer dynamically creates a subclass of a given type but intercepts all method calls. Other than with the Proxy class, this works for both class and interface types. The following example and some of the examples after are based on this simple Java POJO:

public class SampleClass {
  public String test(String input) {
    return "Hello world!";
  }
}

Using cglib, the return value of test(String) method can easily be replaced by another value using an Enhancer and a FixedValue callback:

@Test
public void testFixedValue() throws Exception {
  Enhancer enhancer = new Enhancer();
  enhancer.setSuperclass(SampleClass.class);
  enhancer.setCallback(new FixedValue() {
    @Override
    public Object loadObject() throws Exception {
      return "Hello cglib!";
    }
  });
  SampleClass proxy = (SampleClass) enhancer.create();
  assertEquals("Hello cglib!", proxy.test(null));
}

In the above example, the enhancer will return an instance of an instrumented subclass of SampleClass where all method calls return a fixed value which is generated by the anonymous FixedValue implementation above. The object is created by Enhancer#create(Object...) where the method takes any number of arguments which are used to pick any constructor of the enhanced class. (Even though constructors are only methods on the Java byte code level, the Enhancer class cannot instrument constructors. Neither can it instrument static or final classes.) If you only want to create a class, but no instance, Enhancer#createClass will create a Class instance which can be used to create instances dynamically. All constructors of the enhanced class will be available as delegation constructors in this dynamically generated class.

Be aware that any method call will be delegated in the above example, also calls to the methods defined in java.lang.Object. As a result, a call to proxy.toString() will also return "Hello cglib!". In contrast will a call to proxy.hashCode() result in a ClassCastException since the FixedValue interceptor always returns a String even though the Object#hashCode signature requires a primitive integer.

Another observation that can be made is that final methods are not intercepted. An example of such a method is Object#getClass which will return something like "SampleClass$$EnhancerByCGLIB$$e277c63c" when it is invoked. This class name is generated randomly by cglib in order to avoid naming conflicts. Be aware of the different class of the enhanced instance when you are making use of explicit types in your program code. The class generated by cglib will however be in the same package as the enhanced class (and therefore be able to override package-private methods). Similar to final methods, the subclassing approach makes for the inability of enhancing final classes. Therefore frameworks as Hibernate cannot persist final classes.


Next, let us look at a more powerful callback class, the InvocationHandler, that can also be used with an Enhancer:

@Test
public void testInvocationHandler() throws Exception {
  Enhancer enhancer = new Enhancer();
  enhancer.setSuperclass(SampleClass.class);
  enhancer.setCallback(new InvocationHandler() {
    @Override
    public Object invoke(Object proxy, Method method, Object[] args) 
        throws Throwable {
      if(method.getDeclaringClass() != Object.class && method.getReturnType() == String.class) {
        return "Hello cglib!";
      } else {
        throw new RuntimeException("Do not know what to do.");
      }
    }
  });
  SampleClass proxy = (SampleClass) enhancer.create();
  assertEquals("Hello cglib!", proxy.test(null));
  assertNotEquals("Hello cglib!", proxy.toString());
}

This callback allows us to answer with regards to the invoked method. However, you should be careful when calling a method on the proxy object that comes with the InvocationHandler#invoke method. All calls on this method will be dispatched with the same InvocationHandler and might therefore result in an endless loop. In order to avoid this, we can use yet another callback dispatcher:

@Test
public void testMethodInterceptor() throws Exception {
  Enhancer enhancer = new Enhancer();
  enhancer.setSuperclass(SampleClass.class);
  enhancer.setCallback(new MethodInterceptor() {
    @Override
    public Object intercept(Object obj, Method method, Object[] args, MethodProxy proxy)
        throws Throwable {
      if(method.getDeclaringClass() != Object.class && method.getReturnType() == String.class) {
        return "Hello cglib!";
      } else {
        proxy.invokeSuper(obj, args);
      }
    }
  });
  SampleClass proxy = (SampleClass) enhancer.create();
  assertEquals("Hello cglib!", proxy.test(null));
  assertNotEquals("Hello cglib!", proxy.toString());
  proxy.hashCode(); // Does not throw an exception or result in an endless loop.
}

The MethodInterceptor allows full control over the intercepted method and offers some utilities for calling the method of the enhanced class in their original state. But why would one want to use other methods anyways? Because the other methods are more efficient and cglib is often used in edge case frameworks where efficiency plays a significant role. The creation and linkage of the MethodInterceptor requires for example the generation of a different type of byte code and the creation of some runtime objects that are not required with the InvocationHandler. Because of that, there are other classes that can be used with the Enhancer:

• LazyLoader: Even though the LazyLoader's only method has the same method signature as FixedValue, the LazyLoader is fundamentally different to the FixedValue interceptor. The LazyLoader is actually supposed to return an instance of a subclass of the enhanced class. This instance is requested only when a method is called on the enhanced object and then stored for future invocations of the generated proxy. This makes sense if your object is expensive in its creation without knowing if the object will ever be used. Be aware that some constructor of the enhanced class must be called both for the proxy object and for the lazily loaded object. Thus, make sure that there is another cheap (maybe protected) constructor available or use an interface type for the proxy. You can choose the invoked constructed by supplying arguments to Enhancer#create(Object...).
• Dispatcher: The Dispatcher is like the LazyLoader but will be invoked on every method call without storing the loaded object. This allows to change the implementation of a class without changing the reference to it. Again, be aware that some constructor must be called for both the proxy and the generated objects.
• ProxyRefDispatcher: This class carries a reference to the proxy object it is invoked from in its signature. This allows for example to delegate method calls to another method of this proxy. Be aware that this can easily cause an endless loop and will always cause an endless loop if the same method is called from within ProxyRefDispatcher#loadObject(Object).
• NoOp: The NoOp class does not what its name suggests. Instead, it delegates each method call to the enhanced class's method implementation.

At this point, the last two interceptors might not make sense to you. Why would you even want to enhance a class when you will always delegate method calls to the enhanced class anyways? And you are right. These interceptors should only be used together with a CallbackFilter as it is demonstrated in the following code snippet:

@Test
public void testCallbackFilter() throws Exception {
  Enhancer enhancer = new Enhancer();
  CallbackHelper callbackHelper = new CallbackHelper(SampleClass.class, new Class[0]) {
    @Override
    protected Object getCallback(Method method) {
      if(method.getDeclaringClass() != Object.class && method.getReturnType() == String.class) {
        return new FixedValue() {
          @Override
          public Object loadObject() throws Exception {
            return "Hello cglib!";
          };
        }
      } else {
        return NoOp.INSTANCE; // A singleton provided by NoOp.
      }
    }
  };
  enhancer.setSuperclass(MyClass.class);
  enhancer.setCallbackFilter(callbackHelper);
  enhancer.setCallbacks(callbackHelper.getCallbacks());
  SampleClass proxy = (SampleClass) enhancer.create();
  assertEquals("Hello cglib!", proxy.test(null));
  assertNotEquals("Hello cglib!", proxy.toString());
  proxy.hashCode(); // Does not throw an exception or result in an endless loop.
}

The Enhancer instance accepts a CallbackFilter in its Enhancer#setCallbackFilter(CallbackFilter) method where it expects methods of the enhanced class to be mapped to array indices of an array of Callback instances. When a method is invoked on the created proxy, the Enhancer will then choose the according interceptor and dispatch the called method on the corresponding Callback (which is a marker interface for all the interceptors that were introduced so far). To make this API less awkward, cglib offers a CallbackHelper which will represent a CallbackFilter and which can create an array of Callbacks for you. The enhanced object above will be functionally equivalent to the one in the example for the MethodInterceptor but it allows you to write specialized interceptors whilst keeping the dispatching logic to these interceptors separate.

 

How does it work?

When the Enhancer creates a class, it will set create a private static field for each interceptor that was registered as a Callback for the enhanced class after its creation. This also means that class definitions that were created with cglib cannot be reused after their creation since the registration of callbacks does not become a part of the generated class's initialization phase but are prepared manually by cglib after the class was already initialized by the JVM. This also means that classes created with cglib are not technically ready after their initialization and for example cannot be sent over the wire since the callbacks would not exist for the class loaded in the target machine.

Depending on the registered interceptors, cglib might register additional fields such as for example for the MethodInterceptor where two private static fields (one holding a reflective Method and a the other holding MethodProxy) are registered per method that is intercepted in the enhanced class or any of its subclasses. Be aware that the MethodProxy is making excessive use of the FastClass which triggers the creation of additional classes and is described in further detail below.

For all these reasons, be careful when using the Enhancer. And always register callback types defensively, since the MethodInterceptor will for example trigger the creation of additional classes and register additional fields in the enhanced class. This is specifically dangerous since the callback variables are also stored in the enhancer's cache: This implies that the callback instances are not garbage collected (unless all instances and the enhancer's ClassLoader is, what is unusual). This is in particular dangerous when using anonymous classes which silently carry a reference to their outer class. Recall the example above:

@Test
public void testFixedValue() throws Exception {
  Enhancer enhancer = new Enhancer();
  enhancer.setSuperclass(SampleClass.class);
  enhancer.setCallback(new FixedValue() {
    @Override
    public Object loadObject() throws Exception {
      return "Hello cglib!";
    }
  });
  SampleClass proxy = (SampleClass) enhancer.create();
  assertEquals("Hello cglib!", proxy.test(null));
}

The anonymous subclass of FixedValue would become hardly referenced from the enhanced SampleClass such that neither the anonymous FixedValue instance or the class holding the @Test method would ever be garbage collected. This can introduce nasty memory leaks in your applications. Therefore, do not use non-static inner classes with cglib. (I only use them in this blog entry for keeping the examples short.)

Finally, you should never intercept Object#finalize(). Due to the subclassing approach of cglib, intercepting finalize is implemented by overriding it what is in general a bad idea. Enhanced instances that intercept finalize will be treated differently by the garbage collector and will also cause these objects being queued in the JVM's finalization queue. Also, if you (accidentally) create a hard reference to the enhanced class in your intercepted call to finalize, you have effectively created an noncollectable instance. This is in general nothing you want. Note that final methods are never intercepted by cglib. Thus, Object#wait, Object#notify and Object#notifyAll do not impose the same problems. Be however aware that Object#clone can be intercepted what is something you might not want to do.

Immutable bean

cglib's ImmutableBean allows you to create an immutability wrapper similar to for example Collections#immutableSet. All changes of the underlying bean will be prevented by an IllegalStateException (however, not by an UnsupportedOperationException as recommended by the Java API). Looking at some bean

public class SampleBean {
  private String value;
  public String getValue() {
    return value;
  }
  public void setValue(String value) {
    this.value = value;
  }
}

we can make this bean immutable:

@Test(expected = IllegalStateException.class)
public void testImmutableBean() throws Exception {
  SampleBean bean = new SampleBean();
  bean.setValue("Hello world!");
  SampleBean immutableBean = (SampleBean) ImmutableBean.create(bean);
  assertEquals("Hello world!", immutableBean.getValue());
  bean.setValue("Hello world, again!");
  assertEquals("Hello world, again!", immutableBean.getValue());
  immutableBean.setValue("Hello cglib!"); // Causes exception.
}

As obvious from the example, the immutable bean prevents all state changes by throwing an IllegalStateException. However, the state of the bean can be changed by changing the original object. All such changes will be reflected by the ImmutableBean.

Bean generator

The BeanGenerator is another bean utility of cglib. It will create a bean for you at run time:

@Test
public void testBeanGenerator() throws Exception {
  BeanGenerator beanGenerator = new BeanGenerator();
  beanGenerator.addProperty("value", String.class);
  Object myBean = beanGenerator.create();
  
  Method setter = myBean.getClass().getMethod("setValue", String.class);
  setter.invoke(myBean, "Hello cglib!");
  Method getter = myBean.getClass().getMethod("getValue");
  assertEquals("Hello cglib!", getter.invoke(myBean));
}

As obvious from the example, the BeanGenerator first takes some properties as name value pairs. On creation, the BeanGenerator creates the accessors

• <type> get<name>()
• void set<name>(<type>)

for you. This might be useful when another library expects beans which it resolved by reflection but you do not know these beans at run time. (An example would be Apache Wicket which works a lot with beans.)

Bean copier

The BeanCopier is another bean utility that copies beans by their property values. Consider another bean with similar properties as SampleBean:

public class OtherSampleBean {
  private String value;
  public String getValue() {
    return value;
  }
  public void setValue(String value) {
    this.value = value;
  }
}

Now you can copy properties from one bean to another:

@Test
public void testBeanCopier() throws Exception {
  BeanCopier copier = BeanCopier.create(SampleBean.class, OtherSampleBean.class, false);
  SampleBean bean = new SampleBean();
  myBean.setValue("Hello cglib!");
  OtherSampleBean otherBean = new OtherSampleBean();
  copier.copy(bean, otherBean, null);
  assertEquals("Hello cglib!", otherBean.getValue());  
}

without being restrained to a specific type. The BeanCopier#copy mehtod takles an (eventually) optional Converter which allows to do some further manipulations on each bean property. If the BeanCopier is created with false as the third constructor argument, the Converter is ignored and can therefore be null.

Bulk bean

A BulkBean allows to use a specified set of a bean's accessors by arrays instead of method calls:

@Test
public void testBulkBean() throws Exception {
  BulkBean bulkBean = BulkBean.create(SampleBean.class, 
      new String[]{"getValue"}, 
      new String[]{"setValue"}, 
      new Class[]{String.class});
  SampleBean bean = new SampleBean();
  bean.setValue("Hello world!");
  assertEquals(1, bulkBean.getPropertyValues(bean).length);
  assertEquals("Hello world!", bulkBean.getPropertyValues(bean)[0]);
  bulkBean.setPropertyValues(bean, new Object[] {"Hello cglib!"});
  assertEquals("Hello cglib!", bean.getValue());
}

The BulkBean takes an array of getter names, an array of setter names and an array of property types as its constructor arguments. The resulting instrumented class can then extracted as an array by BulkBean#getPropertyBalues(Object). Similarly, a bean's properties can be set by BulkBean#setPropertyBalues(Object, Object[]).

Bean map

This is the last bean utility within the cglib library. The BeanMap converts all properties of a bean to a String-to-Object Java Map:

@Test
public void testBeanGenerator() throws Exception {
  SampleBean bean = new SampleBean();
  BeanMap map = BeanMap.create(bean);
  bean.setValue("Hello cglib!");
  assertEquals("Hello cglib", map.get("value"));
}

Additionally, the BeanMap#newInstance(Object) method allows to create maps for other beans by reusing the same Class.

Key factory 

The KeyFactory factory allows the dynamic creation of keys that are composed of multiple values that can be used in for example Map implementations. For doing so, the KeyFactory requires some interface that defines the values that should be used in such a key. This interface must contain a single method by the name newInstance that returns an Object. For example:

public interface SampleKeyFactory {
  Object newInstance(String first, int second);
}

Now an instance of a a key can be created by:

@Test
public void testKeyFactory() throws Exception {
  SampleKeyFactory keyFactory = (SampleKeyFactory) KeyFactory.create(Key.class);
  Object key = keyFactory.newInstance("foo", 42);
  Map<Object, String> map = new HashMap<Object, String>();
  map.put(key, "Hello cglib!");
  assertEquals("Hello cglib!", map.get(keyFactory.newInstance("foo", 42)));
}

The KeyFactory will assure the correct implementation of the Object#equals(Object) and Object#hashCode methods such that the resulting key objects can be used in a Map or a Set. The KeyFactory is also used quite a lot internally in the cglib library.

Mixin

Some might already know the concept of the Mixin class from other programing languages such as Ruby or Scala (where mixins are called traits). cglib Mixins allow the combination of several objects into a single object. However, in order to do so, those objects must be backed by interfaces:

public interface Interface1 {
  String first();
}

public interface Interface2 {
  String second();
}

public class Class1 implements Interface1 {
  @Override 
  public String first() {
    return "first";
  }
}

public class Class2 implements Interface2 {
  @Override 
  public String second() {
    return "second";
  }
}

Now the classes Class1 and Class2 can be combined to a single class by an additional interface:

public interface MixinInterface extends Interface1, Interface2 { /* empty */ }

@Test
public void testMixin() throws Exception {
  Mixin mixin = Mixin.create(new Class[]{Interface1.class, Interface2.class, 
      MixinInterface.class}, new Object[]{new Class1(), new Class2()});
  MixinInterface mixinDelegate = (MixinInterface) mixin;
  assertEquals("first", mixinDelegate.first());
  assertEquals("second", mixinDelegate.second());
}

Admittedly, the Mixin API is rather awkward since it requires the classes used for a mixin to implement some interface such that the problem could also be solved by non-instrumented Java.

String switcher

The StringSwitcher emulates a String to int Java Map:

@Test
public void testStringSwitcher() throws Exception {
  String[] strings = new String[]{"one", "two"};
  int[] values = new int[]{10, 20};
  StringSwitcher stringSwitcher = StringSwitcher.create(strings, values, true);
  assertEquals(10, stringSwitcher.intValue("one"));
  assertEquals(20, stringSwitcher.intValue("two"));
  assertEquals(-1, stringSwitcher.intValue("three"));
}

The StringSwitcher allows to emulate a switch command on Strings such as it is possible with the built-in Java switch statement since Java 7. If using the StringSwitcher in Java 6 or less really adds a benefit to your code remains however doubtful and I would personally not recommend its use.

Interface maker

The InterfaceMaker does what its name suggests: It dynamically creates a new interface.

@Test
public void testInterfaceMaker() throws Exception {
  Signature signature = new Signature("foo", Type.DOUBLE_TYPE, new Type[]{Type.INT_TYPE});
  InterfaceMaker interfaceMaker = new InterfaceMaker();
  interfaceMaker.add(signature, new Type[0]);
  Class iface = interfaceMaker.create();
  assertEquals(1, iface.getMethods().length);
  assertEquals("foo", iface.getMethods()[0].getName());
  assertEquals(double.class, iface.getMethods()[0].getReturnType());
}

Other than any other class of cglib's public API, the interface maker relies on ASM types. The creation of an interface in a running application will hardly make sense since an interface only represents a type which can be used by a compiler to check types. It can however make sense when you are generating code that is to be used in later development.

Method delegate

A MethodDelegate allows to emulate a C#-like delegate to a specific method by binding a method call to some interface. For example, the following code would bind the SampleBean#getValue method to a delegate:

public interface BeanDelegate {
  String getValueFromDelegate();
}

@Test
public void testMethodDelegate() throws Exception {
  SampleBean bean = new SampleBean();
  bean.setValue("Hello cglib!");
  BeanDelegate delegate = (BeanDelegate) MethodDelegate.create(
      bean, "getValue", BeanDelegate.class);
  assertEquals("Hello world!", delegate.getValueFromDelegate());
}

There are however some things to note:

• The factory method MethodDelegate#create takes exactly one method name as its second argument. This is the method the MethodDelegate will proxy for you.
• There must be a method without arguments defined for the object which is given to the factory method as its first argument. Thus, the MethodDelegate is not as strong as it could be.
• The third argument must be an interface with exactly one argument. The MethodDelegate implements this interface and can be cast to it. When the method is invoked, it will call the proxied method on the object that is the first argument.

Furthermore, consider these drawbacks:

• cglib creates a new class for each proxy. Eventually, this will litter up your permanent generation heap space
• You cannot proxy methods that take arguments.
• If your interface takes arguments, the method delegation will simply not work without an exception thrown (the return value will always be null). If your interface requires another return type (even if that is more general), you will get a IllegalArgumentException. 

Multicast delegate

The MulticastDelegate works a little different than the MethodDelegate even though it aims at similar functionality. For using the MulticastDelegate, we require an object that implements an interface:

public interface DelegatationProvider {
  void setValue(String value);
}

public class SimpleMulticastBean implements DelegatationProvider {
  private String value;
  public String getValue() {
    return value;
  }
  public void setValue(String value) {
    this.value = value;
  }
}

Based on this interface-backed bean we can create a MulticastDelegate that dispatches all calls to setValue(String) to several classes that implement the DelegationProvider interface:

@Test
public void testMulticastDelegate() throws Exception {
  MulticastDelegate multicastDelegate = MulticastDelegate.create(
      DelegatationProvider.class);
  SimpleMulticastBean first = new SimpleMulticastBean();
  SimpleMulticastBean second = new SimpleMulticastBean();
  multicastDelegate = multicastDelegate.add(first);
  multicastDelegate = multicastDelegate.add(second);

  DelegatationProvider provider = (DelegatationProvider)multicastDelegate;
  provider.setValue("Hello world!");

  assertEquals("Hello world!", first.getValue());
  assertEquals("Hello world!", second.getValue());
}

Again, there are some drawbacks:

• The objects need to implement a single-method interface. This sucks for third-party libraries and is awkward when you use CGlib to do some magic where this magic gets exposed to the normal code. Also, you could implement your own delegate easily (without byte code though but I doubt that you win so much over manual delegation).
• When your delegates return a value, you will receive only that of the last delegate you added. All other return values are lost (but retrieved at some point by the multicast delegate). 

Constructor delegate

A ConstructorDelegate allows to create a byte-instrumented factory method. For that, that we first require an interface with a single method newInstance which returns an Object and takes any amount of parameters to be used for a constructor call of the specified class. For example, in order to create a ConstructorDelegate for the SampleBean, we require the following to call SampleBean's default (no-argument) constructor:

public interface SampleBeanConstructorDelegate {
  Object newInstance();
}

@Test
public void testConstructorDelegate() throws Exception {
  SampleBeanConstructorDelegate constructorDelegate = (SampleBeanConstructorDelegate) ConstructorDelegate.create(
    SampleBean.class, SampleBeanConstructorDelegate.class);
  SampleBean bean = (SampleBean) constructorDelegate.newInstance();
  assertTrue(SampleBean.class.isAssignableFrom(bean.getClass()));
}

Parallel sorter

The ParallelSorter claims to be a faster alternative to the Java standard library's array sorters when sorting arrays of arrays:

@Test
public void testParallelSorter() throws Exception {
  Integer[][] value = {
    {4, 3, 9, 0},
    {2, 1, 6, 0}
  };
  ParallelSorter.create(value).mergeSort(0);
  for(Integer[] row : value) {
    int former = -1;
    for(int val : row) {
      assertTrue(former < val);
      former = val;
    }
  }
}

The ParallelSorter takes an array of arrays and allows to either apply a merge sort or a quick sort on every row of the array. Be however careful when you use it:

•  When using arrays of primitives, you have to call merge sort with explicit sorting ranges (e.g. ParallelSorter.create(value).mergeSort(0, 0, 3) in the example. Otherwise, the ParallelSorter has a pretty obvious bug where it tries to cast the primitive array to an array Object[] what will cause a ClassCastException.
• If the array rows are uneven, the first argument will determine the length of what row to consider. Uneven rows will either lead to the extra values not being considered for sorting or a ArrayIndexOutOfBoundException.

Personally, I doubt that the ParallelSorter really offers a time advantage. Admittedly, I did however not yet try to benchmark it. If you tried it, I'd be happy to hear about it in the comments.

Fast class and fast members

The FastClass promises a faster invocation of methods than the Java reflection API by wrapping a Java class and offering similar methods to the reflection API:

@Test
public void testFastClass() throws Exception {
  FastClass fastClass = FastClass.create(SampleBean.class);
  FastMethod fastMethod = fastClass.getMethod(SampleBean.class.getMethod("getValue"));
  MyBean myBean = new MyBean();
  myBean.setValue("Hello cglib!");
  assertTrue("Hello cglib!", fastMethod.invoke(myBean, new Object[0]));
}

Besides the demonstrated FastMethod, the FastClass can also create FastConstructors but no fast fields. But how can the FastClass be faster than normal reflection? Java reflection is executed by JNI where method invocations are executed by some C-code. The FastClass on the other side creates some byte code that calls the method directly from within the JVM. However, the newer versions of the HotSpot JVM (and probably many other modern JVMs) know a concept called inflation where the JVM will translate reflective method calls into native version's of FastClass when a reflective method is executed often enough. You can even control this behavior (at least on a HotSpot JVM) with setting the sun.reflect.inflationThreshold property to a lower value. (The default is 15.) This property determines after how many reflective invocations a JNI call should be substituted by a byte code instrumented version. I would therefore recommend to not use FastClass on modern JVMs, it can however fine-tune performance on older Java virtual machines.

cglib proxy

The cglib Proxy is a reimplementation of the Java Proxy class mentioned in the beginning of this article. It is intended to allow using the Java library's proxy in Java versions before Java 1.3 and differs only in minor details. The better documentation of the cglib Proxy can however be found in the Java standard library's Proxy javadoc where an example of its use is provided. For this reason, I will skip a more detailed discussion of the cglib's Proxy at this place.

A final word of warning

After this overview of cglib's functionality, I want to speak a final word of warning. All cglib classes generate byte code which results in additional classes being stored in a special section of the JVM's memory: The so called perm space. This permanent space is, as the name suggests, used for permanent objects that do not usually get garbage collected. This is however not completely true: Once a Class is loaded, it cannot be unloaded until the loading ClassLoader becomes available for garbage collection. This is only the case the Class was loaded with a custom ClassLoader which is not a native JVM system ClassLoader. This ClassLoader can be garbage collected if itself, all Classes it ever loaded and all instances of all Classes it ever loaded become available for garbage collection. This means: If you create more and more classes throughout the life of a Java application and if you do not take care of the removal of these classes, you will sooner or later run of of perm space what will result in your application's death by the hands of an OutOfMemoryError. Therefore, use cglib sparingly. However, if you use cglib wisely and carefully, you can really do amazing things with it that go beyond what you can do with non-instrumented Java applications.

Lastly, when creating projects that depend on cglib, you should be aware of the fact that the cglib project is not as well maintained and active as it should be, considering its popularity. The missing documentation is a first hint. The often messy public API a second. But then there are also broken deploys of cglib to Maven central. The mailing list reads like an archive of spam messages. And the release cycles are rather unstable. You might therefore want to have a look at javassist, the only real low-level alternative to cglib. Javassist comes bundled with a pseudo-java compiler what allows to create quite amazing byte code instrumentations without even understanding Java byte code. If you like to get your hands dirty, you might also like ASM on top of which cglib is built. ASM comes with a great documentation of both the library and Java class files and their byte code.

Note that these examples only run with cglib 2.2.2 and are not compatible with the newest release 3 of cglib. Unfortunately, I experienced the newest cglib version to occasionally produce invalid byte code which is why I considered an old version and also use this version in production. Also, note that most projects using cglib move the library to their own namespace in order to avoid version conflicts with other dependencies such as for example demonstrated by the Spring project. You should do the same with your project when making use of cglib. Tools such like jarjar can help you with the automation of this good practice.