Which frameworks (and associated languages) support class replacement?

Posted by Alix on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Alix
Published on 2010-06-15T08:06:10Z Indexed on 2010/06/15 8:32 UTC
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Hi,

I'm writing my master thesis, which deals with AOP in .NET, among other things, and I mention the lack of support for replacing classes at load time as an important factor in the fact that there are currently no .NET AOP frameworks that perform true dynamic weaving -- not without imposing the requirement that woven classes must extend ContextBoundObject or MarshalByRefObject or expose all their semantics on an interface.

You can however do this with the JVM thanks to ClassFileTransformer:

  • You extend ClassFileTransformer.
  • You subscribe to the class load event.
  • On class load, you rewrite the class and replace it.

All this is very well, but my project director has asked me, quite in the last minute, to give him a list of frameworks (and associated languages) that do / do not support class replacement. I really have no time to look for this now: I wouldn't feel comfortable just doing a superficial research and potentially putting erroneous information in my thesis.

So I ask you, oh almighty programming community, can you help out? Of course, I'm not asking you to research this yourselves. Simply, if you know for sure that a particular framework supports / doesn't support this, leave it as an answer. If you're not sure please don't forget to point it out.

Thanks so much!

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