Introduction

The main goal of the reloading classloader plugin is enabling rapid application development. It uses the Jakarta Commons JCI library which provides a reloading classloader. As the names already promises, it is able to watch resources (e.g. .class files) for changes. In such a case the classloader will use the latest version of the resources in the future.

Some Java servlet containers already provide the automatic reload of loaded servlet contexts in the case of changes but this comes with the downside that you might lose  the application state.