dynamic class loading at runtime with weld?

[christoferjennings]

Is it possible to dynamically load classes into weld during runtime?

We've got a JEE6 web-app running on JBoss 7.2. CDI is a central part of it (of course). Now we want to support adding new features to the app through the app's own UI. That is, we'd like to allow an Admin user to upload a JAR with compiled Java classes and have those classes be available for CDI injection (or lookup at least) dynamically without having to redeploy the whole application. ... Is that possible with weld? I've searched around online and have got the impression that it's not. So I'm just checking to make sure I didn't get it wrong.

An alternate solution would be to allow the Admin to upload Groovy scripts, or some other dynamic scripting language. We might do that. But using pre-compiled classes fits better with my customer's development processes and quality control.

Thanks!

chris

[mkouba]

You're right, this is not possible (CDI has a well-defined lifecycle which does not support dynamic addition/removal of beans). I think using OSGi bundles and PAX CDI (https://github.com/ops4j/org.ops4j.pax.cdi) might be the right alternative for your use-case.

[christoferjennings]

Thanks Martin!

PAX CDI looks like it might be what we need.