Unloading classes in java?

Question

I have a custom class loader so that a desktop application can dynamically start loading classes from an AppServer I need to talk to. We did this since the amount of jars th

Answer 1

Classes have an implicit strong reference to their ClassLoader instance, and vice versa. They are garbage collected as with Java objects. Without hitting the tools interface or similar, you can't remove individual classes.

As ever you can get memory leaks. Any strong reference to one of your classes or class loader will leak the whole thing. This occurs with the Sun implementations of ThreadLocal, java.sql.DriverManager and java.beans, for instance.