Classloaders

Remarks

A classloader is a class whose primary purpose is to mediate the location and loading of classes used by an application. A class loader can also find and loaded resources.

The standard classloader classes can load classes and resources from directories in the file system and from JAR and ZIP files. They can also download and cache JAR and ZIP files from a remote server.

Classloaders are normally chained, so that the JVM will try to load classes from the standard class libraries in preference to application-provided sources. Custom classloaders allow the programmer to alter this. The also can do such things as decrypting bytecode files and bytecode modification.