Making Java more dynamic

Although Java’s strict type system is a great help for avoiding programming errors, it also takes away some of the flexibility that developers appreciate when using dynamic languages. With runtime code generation, it is possible to bring some of this flexibility back to the Java virtual machine. For this reason, runtime code generation is widely used by many state-of-the-art Java frameworks for implementing POJO-centric APIs, but it also opens the door to assembling more modular applications. This presentation offers an introduction to runtime code generation and its use on the Java platform. Furthermore, it discusses the upsides and downsides of several code generation libraries such as ASM, Javassist, cglib, and Byte Buddy.