Difference between Reflection and Late Binding in java with real time examples

Question

While studying Java tutorials, Reflection and Late Binding have confused me. In some tutorials, they have written that they are both the same, and that there isn't any difference between Reflection and Late Binding. But other tutorials say that there is a difference.

I am confused, so can someone please explain what Reflection and Late Binding are in Java, and if posible, please give me some real world examples of both.

Thanks..

Answer 1

Late binding (also known as dynamic dispatch) does not need reflection -- it still needs to know which member to dynamically bind to at compile-time (i.e. the signature of the member is known at compile-time), even though the binding to overridden members happens at run-time.

When doing reflection, you don't even know which member you're using (not even the name is known at compile-time, let alone the signature) -- everything happens at run-time, so it's a lot slower.

Answer 2

Java uses late-binding to support polymorphism; which means the decision of which of the many methods should be used is deferred until runtime.

Take the case of N classes implementing an abstract method of an interface (or an abstract class, fwiw).

public interface IMyInterface {

    public void doSomething();    
}

public class MyClassA implements IMyInterface {

    public void doSomething(){ ... }
}

public class MyClassB implements IMyInterface {

    public void doSomething(){ ... }
}

public class Caller {

    public void doCall(IMyInterface i){
        // which implementation of doSomething is called?
        // it depends on the type of i: this is late binding
        i.doSomething(); 
    }
}

Reflection is used instead to describe code which is able to inspect other code, ie. to know which methods or attributes are available in a class, to call a method (or load a class) by name, and doing a lot of very interesting things at runtime.

A very nice explaination of reflection is here: What is reflection and why is it useful?

Answer 3

Real world examples:

If you build your project with jdesktop 0.8, but ship with jdesktop 0.9, your code will still use the 0.9 features, because it takes advantage of late binding, i.e. the code that your code calls is the version that is loaded by the class loader, irrespective of the version that it was compiled against. (This is as opposed to linkers, which embed the compile-time version of the called code into the application.)

For reflection, let's say you are trying to target Java 1.5 and 1.6, but want to use tab components in 1.6 if they are available, then you'll check for their presence by using reflection on the JTabbedPane class to find the setTabComponentAt method. In this case you're building against Java 1.5, which doesn't have those features at all, so you can't call them directly or the compile will fail. However if on the end-user's system you find yourself running against 1.6 (late binding comes into play here) you can use reflection to call methods that didn't exist in 1.5.

They are related; many uses of reflection rely on late binding to be useful, but they are fundamentally different aspects of the language and its implementation.

Answer 4

One important issue which is addressed by "Late Binding" is the polymorphism, i.e. that the call of the proper overriden method along your class hierachy is determined during the run-time, not during compilation. Reflection is the feature to gather and manipulate information about your objects during run-time. E.g. you can get all attributes or method names of an object using its 'Class' attribute during the runtime and call those methods or manipulate its attributes.

In following code you can dynamically create a new object by the means of reflection (see how the constructor is retrieved and accessed using a Class, instead of using simply something like object obj = new MyClass( "MyInstance" ) ). In a similar way it is possible to access other constructor forms, methods and attributes. For more information about reflection in java visit: http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/ALT/Reflection/

... in some method of some class ...
Class c = getClass();
Constructor ctor = c.getConstructor( String.class );
Object obj = ctor.newInstance( "MyInstance" );

Answer 5

I have to disagree with most of the responses here -

Everyone calls what Java does in terms of zeroing in on a method implementation at runtime as late binding, but in my opinion its not correct to use the term late binding for what java does.

Late binding implies absolutely no checks on a method call at compile time and no compilation errors if the method does not exist.

Java however will throw a compile error if the method does not exist somewhere in the type hierarchy of the type qualifying the method call (being somewhat approximate when describing the behavior here). This is not pure traditional late binding. What Java does in a normal non private non final non static method call would be better termed as dynamic dispatch.
However if we use reflection in Java, then Java does perform pure late binding as the compiler simply cannot verify if the called method exists or not. Here is an example:

class A
{
    public void foo()
    {
        System.out.println("Foo from A");
    }
}

class B extends A
{
    public void foo()
    {
        System.out.println("Foo from B");
    }
}
public class C
{
   public static void main(String [] args)
    {
         A a=new A();
         B b=new B();
         A ref=null;
         Class ref1 = null;
         ref1 = b.getClass();
         ref.foo1();//will not compile because Java in this normal method
         //call does some compile time checks for method and method 
         //signature existence. NOT late binding in its pure form.
         try {
            ref1.getMethod("foo1").invoke(null); //will throw a 
            //NoSuchMethodException at runtime, but compiles perfectly even 
            //though foo1 does not exist. This is pure late binding.
        } catch (Exception e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        } 
       }
}