Bug 392858

Summary:	Integrate RefaFlex plugin for reflection-aware refactorings
Product:	[Eclipse Project] JDT	Reporter:	Eric Bodden <eric>
Component:	UI	Assignee:	JDT-UI-Inbox <jdt-ui-inbox>
Status:	NEW ---	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	P3	CC:	Michael_Rennie
Version:	3.8
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:

Description Eric Bodden

2012-10-25 14:47:29 EDT

We have recently developed an Eclipse plugin named RefaFlex which we believe to be useful to JDT users in general and therefore would like to suggest for integration. RefaFlex deals with the old problem of refactorings being generally unsafe with respect to uses of reflection. 

An illustrative video about the plugin is available here:
http://www.feu.de/ps/prjs/rf/

RefaFlex consists of two parts. When the user launches / test runs an application in Eclipse, RefaFlex records all reflective calls invoked by the application into a log file. (This is achieved through an ASM-based instrumentation agent.) Secondly, when the user tries to invoke a refactoring that would rename/move one of the members referenced by a logged call, then the user is made aware of this fact by means of an automatically added refactoring precondition.

I would like to discuss if the community agrees that an integration of at least some of the features of RefaFlex could be useful / would be desired.