How can I dynamically load classes within an MBean?

So you have created your cool MBean service and you want to dynamically

load and instantiate a class, to implement some sort of plug-in mechanism.

The typical mistake is to use:

   Class.forName("somepackage.SomeClass"); 

This won't work correctly because the bootstrap class loader will be used

to load that class, and this is almost always wrong unless you want to

load system classes.

JBoss uses an advanced and fully configurable classloading mechanism that

associates a UnifiedClassLoader with each top-level deployment. The trick

here is to load the class using the classloader associated with the

deployment, so that you integrate with the JBoss classloading model.

To do this you can do:

   // get the classloader associated with the thread
   ClassLoader cl = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader();            
   // load the class           
   Class clazz = cl.loadClass("somepackage.SomeClass");
   // do whatever with it
   SomeClass someClass = (SomeClass)clazz.newInstance();
   ...

Related:

• ClassLoadingConfiguration

• JBossClassLoadingUseCases

Referenced by: