The approach I have seen is you write your own classloader that then uses a property to load classes from jar files stored in a particular directory. If I remember right, BEA's app server used to do this, quite nice.
David
Lance J. Andersen wrote:
That is a very good point. You could also use lib/ext as well and set the property java.ext.dirs property accordingly
Jeremy Boynes wrote:
Lance J. Andersen wrote:
There is also an issue on windows of a classpath size. I know i have been burnt by this before.
I think most projects of any size, commercial or open source, have moved away from using raw CLASSPATH and use custom classloading.
For example, a common technique is to have a "lib" directory where all files get added into a single classloader - not perfect especially when you may need multiple versions of a library but it works for many applications.
There are also things like the uberjar project at Codehaus for bundling things together.
-- Jeremy
