Thursday, May 27, 2010

JavaAssist - Byte Code Enhancement simplified

JavaAssist - Byte Code Enhancement simplified.

JavaAssist is a class library to manipulate your Java Byte Code without touching the source. Let's take an example of measuring
time taken to execute a method.
public class Subject {

/**
* Timetaken for start & end of the method
* @throws InterruptedException
*/
public void method2() throws InterruptedException {
//Some business logic :)
Thread.sleep(2000);
}

}
To measure time taken for executing subject.method2(), you could enhance the Subject.methods() by adding code start and end of the method as shown.
public class JavaAssist {
public static void main(String[] args) {
public static void timeTaken() {
try {
ClassPool p = ClassPool.getDefault();
CtClass cc = p.get("Subject");
CtMethod meth2 = cc.getDeclaredMethod("method2");
meth2.insertBefore("System.out.println(\" Start : \"+new java.util.Date());");
meth2.insertAfter("System.out.println(\" End : \"+new java.util.Date());");
//cc.writeFile(".");
Class c = cc.toClass();
Subject s = (Subject) c.newInstance();
s.method2();
cc.detach();
} catch (Exception e) {
// suppressed
}
}
}
}
Output:
Start : Wed May 26 17:24:18 EDT 2010
End : Wed May 26 17:24:20 EDT 2010

Cool isn't it!!!. It can do wonders check the API section for more details.

Reference
http://www.csg.is.titech.ac.jp/~chiba/javassist/tutorial/tutorial.html#read
http://www.csg.is.titech.ac.jp/~chiba/javassist/html/


3 comments:

Yair Z said...

Very nice.
However, What bothers me is that I had to use "newInstance" and not simply new to create an object of the instrumented class.
Is there any way I can still use "new" instead?

Thanks,
Yair Z

Senthil Balakrishnan said...

Thanks for the comment. As the saying goes "Any software problem can be solved by adding another layer of indirection"

You can't avoid newInstance, it's a indirection...

javin paul said...

Hi Senthil,

When you do Byte code instrumentation doesn't it make Java Byte Code JVM incompatible , I think whole idea of having Byte Code was that any program will not have access to direct memory location which is illegal in Java.

Thanks
Javin
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