Do you really get classloaders?

Class loaders are at the core of the Java language. Yet when something goes wrong, would you know how to solve it? In this session we’ll take a tour of the Java class loading mechanism, both from JVM and developer point of view. We’ll also look into the typical classloader problems.

Class loaders are at the core of the Java language. Java EE containers, OSGi, NetBeans modules, Grails and many others use class loaders heavily. Yet when something goes wrong, would you know how to solve it?

In this session we’ll take a tour of the Java class loading mechanism, both from JVM and developer point of view. We will look at typical problems that you get with class loading and how to solve them. ClassNoDefError, IncompatibleClassChangeError, LinkageError and many others are symptoms of specific things going wrong that you can usually find and fix. For each problem we’ll go through a hands on demo with a corresponding solution.

We’ll also take a look at how and why classloaders leak and how can you remedy that.

The talk goes through the classloader issues and explains the root cause of each issue and how to diagnose and verify it.