| This interface is merely a marker interface to indicate to RIFE that it
should consider this class as a MetaData class whose
interfaces will be automatically merged into the sibling class that it's
augmenting.
So, consider a class Foo and another class
FooMetaData. When FooMetaData implements
MetaDataMerged, RIFE will adapt Foo and make it
implement all the interfaces that FooMetaData implements.
Also, when the default constructor of Foo is called, an
instance of FooMetaData will be created and stored in a new
hidden member variable. The added method implementations simple delegate to
the instance of FooMetaData.
Optionally, FooMetaData can also implement
MetaDataBeanAware, in which case the instance of
FooMetaData will receive the instance of Foo that it belongs
to right after it has been instantiated.
Note that the relationship between Foo and
FooMetaData is purely name based (the MetaData
suffix). RIFE will look up the meta data class through the classpath, which
means that it's possible to augment any class, anywhere, in any package,
even without having the source code.
See Also: MetaDataBeanAware
author:
Geert Bevin (gbevin[remove] at uwyn dot com)
version:
$Revision: 3634 $
since:
1.4 |