Creating classes dynamically with Java

There are many different ways to achieve this (e.g proxies, ASM), but the simplest approach, one that you can start with when prototyping is:

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
import java.lang.reflect.*;

public class MakeTodayClass {
  Date today = new Date();
  String todayMillis = Long.toString(today.getTime());
  String todayClass = "z_" + todayMillis;
  String todaySource = todayClass + ".java";

  public static void main (String args[]){
    MakeTodayClass mtc = new MakeTodayClass();
    mtc.createIt();
    if (mtc.compileIt()) {
       System.out.println("Running " + mtc.todayClass + ":\n\n");
       mtc.runIt();
       }
    else
       System.out.println(mtc.todaySource + " is bad.");
    }

  public void createIt() {
    try {
      FileWriter aWriter = new FileWriter(todaySource, true);
      aWriter.write("public class "+ todayClass + "{");
      aWriter.write(" public void doit() {");
      aWriter.write(" System.out.println(\""+todayMillis+"\");");
      aWriter.write(" }}\n");
      aWriter.flush();      
      aWriter.close();
      }
    catch(Exception e){
      e.printStackTrace();
      }
    }

  public boolean compileIt() {
    String [] source = { new String(todaySource)};
    ByteArrayOutputStream baos= new ByteArrayOutputStream();

    new sun.tools.javac.Main(baos,source[0]).compile(source);
    // if using JDK >= 1.3 then use
    //   public static int com.sun.tools.javac.Main.compile(source);    
    return (baos.toString().indexOf("error")==-1);
    }

  public void runIt() {
    try {
      Class params[] = {};
      Object paramsObj[] = {};
      Class thisClass = Class.forName(todayClass);
      Object iClass = thisClass.newInstance();
      Method thisMethod = thisClass.getDeclaredMethod("doit", params);
      thisMethod.invoke(iClass, paramsObj);
      }
    catch (Exception e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
      }
    }
}

This is possible, but (I believe) you need something like ASM or BCEL.

Alternately, you could use something with more power (like Groovy).

It is possible to generate classes (via cglib, asm, javassist, bcel), but you shouldn't do it that way. Why?

• the code that's using the library should expect type Object and get all the fields using reflection - not a good idea
• java is statically typed language, and you want to introduce dynamic typing - it's not the place.

If you simply want the data in an undefined format, then you can return it in an array, like Object[], or Map<String, Object> if you want them named, and get it from there - it will save you much trouble with unneeded class generation for the only purpose of containing some data that will be obtained by reflection.

What you can do instead is have predefined classes that will hold the data, and pass them as arguments to querying methods. For example:

 public <T> T executeQuery(Class<T> expectedResultClass, 
      String someArg, Object.. otherArgs) {..}

Thus you can use reflection on the passed expectedResultClass to create a new object of that type and populate it with the result of the query.

That said, I think you could use something existing, like an ORM framework (Hibernate, EclipseLink), spring's JdbcTemplate, etc.

It will take a couple of minutes to create a data model class for each table, which you can easily map to the database with an ORM like Hibernate or by writing your own JDBC DAOs. It is far easier than delving deeply into reflection.

You could create a utility that interrogates the database structure for a table, and creates the data model class and DAO for you. Alternatively you could create the model in Java and create a utility to create the database schema and DAO from that (using reflection and Java 5 Annotations to assist). Don't forget that javaFieldNames are different from database_column_names typically.