I am currently working on a program to make sitting charts for my teacher\'s classroom. I have put all of the data files in the jar. These are read in and put in to a table.
Tomasz is right that the following is bad practice, but it is possible.
The contents of the classpath are read into memory during bootstrapping, however the files are modifiable but their changes will not be reflected after initialisation. I would recommend putting the data into another file, separate to your class files, but if you insist on keeping them together, you could look at:
Make sure you're not reading the resource through the classpath and that it's coming from a file on disk / network.