load new class not old one

[dennis liang]

Hi,

I modified one class of my application, but I don't want to rebuild the whole now and redeploy the whole application.
I just want to create a new jar which only contains this modified class and only deploy this jar.
So when the application restarts, it will load the new class instead of old one.

How can I do this?

Thanks

[Bear Bibeault]

"dennis dl", please check your private messages for an important administrative matter.

[Ulf Dittmer]

There are a few ways of doing this, but all are more complicated than redeploying the full app. Why don't you want to rebuild and redeploy the whole app?

[dennis liang]

Thank you.

If I put the jar in a classpath and let class loader loads it first, the old class will not be loaded.
Someone tried this way before? How?

Thanks

[David Newton]

Completely unreliable: you should never rely on the new class being picked up first--you do not control the classloader, the classloader might change, etc. Having multiple versions of the same class on the classpath is a recipe for tears.

[dennis liang]

Ulf Dittmer wrote:There are a few ways of doing this, but all are more complicated than redeploying the full app. Why don't you want to rebuild and redeploy the whole app?

Please let me know these ways of doing this.
Thanks

[Ulf Dittmer]

Before I go to any length answering that, please tell us this:

Why don't you want to rebuild and redeploy the whole app?

[dennis liang]

Ok.
Here is the scenario.
The application is in production. need to modify one class to fix a simple bug.
Dropping a simple jar in the application without touching the whole application is a simple solution for now.
Next release can rebuild the whole application and conduct full test in QA and redeploy it.

Thanks

[David Newton]

But it's *not* a simple solution, that's the thing.

[dennis liang]

I know there was an app. They put a patch jar in a folder of the app.The loader loaded the new class instead of old one when restart the app. Very useful way.
But I did not ask how.

Thanks

[Ulf Dittmer]

If the use of the class is very localized (and described via an interface), then you can encapsulate its usage via a classloader of your own. If you want to redeploy the class your code can throw away the classloader, and then create a new one that loads the class from the new jar file. It's not trivial, but not particularly hard either if you understand classloaders.

Or you can make it much easier on yourself and use OSGi; this is one of its primary use cases.