Loading classes and resources in Java 9

Question

I was reading this article on InfoQ quoting Reinhold:

Developers can still use the Java class path in Java 9 for the Java runtime to search for classes and resource files. It's just that with Java 9's modules, developers no longer need the class path.

So now my question is: what is the proper Java 9 way to do the tasks listed above? How do you dynamically load e.g. an image (short of fiddling with relative paths)?

Even more interestingly, how would one check if a class is available and make a decision dynamically (e.g. check if Jackson is available and, if so, use it for JSON serialization and if not use something else)?

The article also mentions Spring Boot already supporting Java 9, and Spring Boot definitely does a lot of dynamic loading. So maybe someone knows the priece of code from Spring that I can look at?

Answer 1

First, to set the record straight, I neither said nor wrote the text quoted above. I’d never have put it that way. That’s just sloppy reporting on the part of the publications involved.

The most important thing to understand about class loading and resource lookup in Java 9 is that, at a fundamental level, they have not changed. You can search for classes and resources in the same way that you always have, by invoking Class::forName and the various getResource* methods in the Class and ClassLoader classes, regardless of whether your code is loaded from the class path or the module path. There are still three built-in class loaders, just as there were in JDK 1.2, and they have the same delegation relationships. Lots of existing code therefore just works, out-of-the-box.

There are some nuances, as noted in JEP 261: The concrete type of the built-in class loaders has changed, and some classes formerly loaded by the bootstrap class loader are now loaded by the platform class loader in order to improve security. Existing code which assumes that a built-in class loader is a URLClassLoader, or that a class is loaded by the bootstrap class loader, may therefore require minor adjustments.

A final important difference is that non-class-file resources in a module are encapsulated by default, and hence cannot be located from outside the module unless their effective package is open. To load resources from your own module it’s best to use the resource-lookup methods in Class or Module, which can locate any resource in your module, rather than those in ClassLoader, which can only locate non-class-file resources in the open packages of a module.