"Late Binding" to reduce dependencies
mwildamMay 6 2009 — edited May 18 2009I have written a library that has some methods that should extract data from a passed Swing component. Depending on the contents there might be different operations needed.
What I now do notice that I get a bunch of dependencies to external classes when accessing several widgets on the component (there can be SwingX widgets and other 3rd party widgets). Some of those components I want to support but I do not necessarily include all these components in my library. It might be that several widgets will be found only on 10% of the cases where the library will be used and I do not want to bloat my library.
Is there a way in Java that I can do some sort of "late binding" - so that I load classes at runtime and call particular methods at runtime only?
I did find out how to load classes at runtime but anyway I must "know" some interface class for them at compile time (adding those to the project). So this is not really late binding as I need to include the appropriate interface class at compile time.