A Java Testing Framework Without Reflection

Java reflection allows a program to inspect the structure of objects at run-time and provides a powerful mechanism to achieve many interesting dynamic features in several Java frameworks. However, reflection breaks the static type safety properties of Java programs and introduces a run-time overhead; thus, it might be better to avoid reflection when possible. In this paper, we present a novel Java testing framework where reflection is never used: we implement the framework only with the Object-Oriented and functional programming mechanisms provided by Java. We will show that implementing and using such a framework is easy, and we avoid the run-time overhead of reflection. Our framework can be used with existing testing libraries and is meant to be extendable.