Any way to “reboot” the JVM?

Question

Is there any way to reboot the JVM? As in don\'t actually exit, but close and reload all classes, and run main from the top?

Answer 1

AFAIK there is no such way.

Notice that if there were a way to do that, it would highly depend on the current loaded code to properly release all held resources in order to provide a graceful restart (think about files, socket/tcp/http/database connections, threads, etc).

Some applications, like Jboss AS, capture Ctrl+C on the console and provide a graceful shutdown, closing all resources, but this is application-specific code and not a JVM feature.