Classloader

[Santy Jagtap]

Can we load a user defined class using bootstrap classloader?

[David O'Meara]

You can, but probably not in the way you thought. I'm looking for a link, but there was a white paper by Ted Neward where he gave an example of replacing standard Java libraries using the -Xbootclasspath setting.

[David O'Meara]

Oh (pdf), that wasn't so hard. Hope this helps.

Dave

[Santy Jagtap]

Yes that was of gr8 help to me...
But just want to know is there any other way of doing the same?

[David O'Meara]

weeeeelllllll, you could write your own JVM?

[Santy Jagtap]

generally bootestrap classes are loaded from jre's lib directory
so can we put our class file into that.
Not sure whether it 'll load using bootstrap classloader or system?

[David O'Meara]

Read the section Solution Discussion, Part I where they do just this. The observation is that by outputting the sun.boot.class.path property, there are non-existant locations included in the boothpath. By placing files there, they get loaded by the boot ClassLoader! Sounds nasty and non-transferable, but true.

Possibly a question I should have asked earlier: Why?

[Santy Jagtap]

generally bootestrap classes are loaded from jre's lib directory
so can we put our class file into that.
Not sure whether it 'll load using bootstrap classloader or system?

[David O'Meara]

You should test it and find out.