Re: [hibernate-dev] Reflite

Hi, I haven't followed the discussion around "reflite" closely, so I'm just going to add some thoughts/questions coming to my mind after exploring the model a bit: * Is there some sort of design document which describes at a higher level the purpose and the benefit of the model? If not, e.g. JavaDocs on the package level (or one of the new topical guides) would be great for that. * What is the primary motivation for having this model, is it about ease-of-use or performance (through Jandex) compared to using plain reflection, or something else? * The "reflite" model remembers me a bit of the one in javax.lang.model.type.* [1]. So if the aim of "reflite" is to provide a "complete" model which can represent each and every specific of the Java type system, it might make sense to implement this pre-defined model (it's all interfaces) based on Jandex/ClassMate instead of defining a custom model. But if we're only interested in a specific sub-set of the Java type-model, having a custom model probably is the better choice as it provides a simpler-to-use contract (and it may allow for a "domain-specific" language, e.g. by working with concepts such as "entity" instead of the generic "Java type"). * Regarding a "collapsed" representation of type information (as done by java.lang.Class) vs. a hierarchy of specialized types, I think it depends on the usage patterns. With the current approach, how are clients supposed to take action depending on the specific type of a descriptor (if they have a reference to the super-type of the hierarchy)? Via instanceof calls? The javax model API provides a (rather verbose) visitor approach as well as method getKind() for this (so the latter is basically instanceof). --Gunnar [1] http://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/index.html?javax/lang/model/type... 2014-06-03 12:51 GMT+02:00 Hardy Ferentschik <hardy(a)hibernate.org&gt;: