Rafael Winterhalter Java byte code in practice

At first glance, Java byte code can appear to be some low level magic that is both hard to understand and effectively irrelevant to application developers. However, neither is true. With only little practice, Java byte code becomes easy to read and can give true insights into the functioning of a Java program. In this talk, we will cast light on compiled Java code and its interplay with the Java virtual machine. In the process, we will look into the evolution of byte code over the recent major releases with features such as dynamic method invocation which is the basis to Java 8 lambda expressions. Finally, we will learn about tools for the run time generation of Java classes and how these tools are used to build modern frameworks and libraries. Among those tools, I present Byte Buddy, an open source tool of my own efforts and an attempt to considerably simplify run time code generation in Java.