Open Source Java ByteCode Library
By admin on Oct 11, 2008 in Java, open source
Here are some open source library for Java byte code manipulation
ASM is an all purpose Java bytecode manipulation and analysis framework. It can be used to modify existing classes or dynamically generate classes, directly in binary form. Provided common transformations and analysis algorithms allow to easily assemble custom complex transformations and code analysis tools.
The ASM bytecode manipulation framework has been designed and implemented to be small and as fast as possible. ASM’s runtime .jar is only 25KB, compared to 350KB for BCEL. The load time overhead caused by class transformation with ASM is about 60 percent with ASM, compared to 700 percent or more with BCEL. These factors have been recognized by the Java community and several well known projects have switched to ASM, such as CGLIB and AspectWerkz. The list of projects that are using form the beginning ASM also includes Speedo, Groovy, dynaop,BeanShell, and a number of others.
The Byte Code Engineering Library is intended to give users a convenient possibility to analyze, create, and manipulate (binary) Java class files (those ending with .class). Classes are represented by objects which contain all the symbolic information of the given class: methods, fields and byte code instructions, in particular. However, the library is not being updated for long time.
Javassist (Java Programming Assistant) makes Java bytecode manipulation simple. It is a class library for editing bytecodes in Java; it enables Java programs to define a new class at runtime and to modify a class file when the JVM loads it. Unlike other similar bytecode editors, Javassist provides two levels of API: source level and bytecode level. If the users use the source-level API, they can edit a class file without knowledge of the specifications of the Java bytecode. The whole API is designed with only the vocabulary of the Java language. You can even specify inserted bytecode in the form of source text; Javassist compiles it on the fly. On the other hand, the bytecode-level API allows the users to directly edit a class file as other editors.
cglib is a powerful, high performance and quality Code Generation Library, It is used to extend JAVA classes and implements interfaces at runtime. It is used by Hibernate, Spring, iBatis and other software.
