Enhancements in 5.0
The changes in java.lang.Class and java.lang.reflect include:
Support for generics - In particular, the changes support
structural program reflection on generic type
information. In other words, they make it possible to examine a type,
method, constructor or field declaration and obtain generic type
information. Specifically, one can determine whether a type, method or
constructor declares any type variables, and reflect those type
variables to the application program (so that one may learn their names
and bounds, for example). One can also obtain the non-erased form of
the type of a field, a method or constructor parameter, a method
return type or the throws clause of a method or constructor. The
generified form of a type name is available via toGenericString().
However, note that we do not provide any support for determining which
generic invocation an instance belongs to.
Support for annotations - This includes the ability to obtain
annotations on types, methods, fields, constructors and formal
parameters of methods and constructors that have been marked as
available at run-time, using the getAnnotation() method. One can also
determine whether an interface is
an annotation type.
Support for enums - One can determine whether a class is an enum,
and whether a field represents an enum constant.
Support for var args - One can determine whether a method or
constructor is a of variable arity.
Convenience methods - for establishing whether a class is local,
anonymous or a member class, and what a type's simple and cannoical
names are. One can also determine whether a member is synthetic (an
artifiact by the implementation).
The generification of class java.lang.Class - This allows the use
of instances of java.lang.Class as type tokens. See
section 8 of the generics tutorial
for examples.