Components

ProxyToys consists of two main components:

• Proxy Factories
• Toy Factories

The Proxy Factories provide an independent way to create general proxy instances. The toys are factories for common problems solved with proxies.

Proxy Factories

Whenever you have a need to create a dynamic proxy, you may use an implementation of the ProxyFactory instead depending directly on the proxy provided by the reflection API of the JDK.

ProxyToys comes with two implementations of such a factory, one based on the reflection API of the JDK itself and the other one based on CGLIB. Each implementation has its own limitations and you might switch the proxy factory depending on the runtime environment as explained in the FAQ.

Always depend on ProxyFactory and select the implementation of your choice.

Other bytecode manipulation libraries may be used to implement alternative ProxyFactory implementations as long as they can support or be used to build a compatible invoker interface.

Toys

The toys exist as solutions for common problems solved with proxy instances. Some are build on top of another and you may derive your own specialized solution based on a available toy implementation. Each toy has a proxy factory (with the exception of the Pool) with static methods, that can be invoked to create a proxy for a single or for multiple types with a special assignment.

Each toys utilizes a special implementation of an Invoker, that is called for each method invocation. In most toy implementations each proxy has its own Invoker instance. For very specialized proxies, you might use a different strategy though.