Yesterday I have rewritten the tutorial from my old blog about how to dynamically load plugins in Java at runtime and used the opportunity to rewrite the code of the plugin loader I created long time ago to make it more performant, clean up its API and improve the readability of the source code. I dropped the support for runtime compiling Java code which heavily improved the performance of the new plugin loader. The old loader needed some seconds for loading JARs, because it needed to bootstrap the Java Compiler Toolkit everytime it loaded a plugin, while with the new loader the plugin JAR is instantly loaded. I also added some tests to ensure that the code is of good quality and provided documentation about how to use it.
The new plugin is now available in Maven Central with the new coordinates:
<groupId>de.osshangar</groupId> <artifactId>java-plugin-framework</artifactId> <version>3.1</version>
See also: How to create a plugin library for Java