Jon Udell writes about code generation ... it's the kind of article that makes me think "Hey, I want to do that too!" and distracts me from whatever I'm working on at the moment. Could be related to an aesthetic I attribute to self-modifying code which was introduced to me in a college course on Assembler programming which also brings to mind the beautiful notion of single instruction set computing.

Tangents leading to tangents. If I keep this up I'll never get back to work.

Since most of my work is done in Java I thought I would see what existed for generating Java code.

First hit was an article at onjava.

This article mostly talks about code generation as a static step that happens before compilation and runtime. I am more interested in generating new Java classes and instantiating them at runtime.

I know the java compiler is available at runtime so I hacked together a little program that takes an SQL query, executes it, generates the source for a JavaBean that matches the returned, compiles the source, then assigns records from the result set into instances of the newly defined class.

Check out the source if you're curious.