Java Instrumentation

java 1.5之后引入了Instrumentation

This class provides services needed to instrument Java programming language code. Instrumentation is the addition of byte-codes to methods for the purpose of gathering data to be utilized by tools. Since the changes are purely additive, these tools do not modify application state or behavior. Examples of such benign tools include monitoring agents, profilers, coverage analyzers, and event loggers. There are two ways to obtain an instance of the Instrumentation interface:

• 1. When a JVM is launched in a way that indicates an agent class. In that case an Instrumentation instance is passed to the premain method of the agent class.
• 2. When a JVM provides a mechanism to start agents sometime after the JVM is launched. In that case an Instrumentation instance is passed to the agentmain method of the agent code.

These mechanisms are described in the package specification.Once an agent acquires an Instrumentation instance, the agent may call methods on the instance at any time.

可以由此实现一个javaagent，通过此agent来修改类的字节码即改变一个类，它类一种更低级、更松耦合的AOP。可以从底层来改变一个类的行为。