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. (http://bytebuddy.net)

Speaker: Rafael Winterhalter

Rafael works as a software engineer in Oslo, Norway. He is a proponent of static typing and a JVM enthusiast with particular interests in code instrumentation, concurrency and functional programming. Rafael blogs about software development, regularly presents at conferences and was pronounced a Java One Rock Star. When coding outside of his work place, he contributes to a wide range of open source projects and often works on Byte Buddy, a library for simple runtime code generation for the Java virtual machine.