Component Development for the Java™ Platform

Chapter 2. The Class Loader Architecture

This chapter introduces Java's class loader architecture, which provides a dynamic, flexible means for locating resources (both code and data) at runtime. Class loaders allow an application to be built from many disparate resources at runtime, and they provide a namespace mechanism that allows multiple versions of the same resource to coexist in a single virtual machine. Class loaders are also integral to the security architecture because they tell the virtual machine (VM) how and from where classes were loaded.

This chapter will cover finding and loading resources, the class loader delegation model for sharing resources, the standard class loaders provided by the core API, debugging class loading, and ...