A class loader that can be created on a Java 7 (JSR-203) file system path. This is very similar to URLClassLoader except that it works on any file system. URLClassLoader only works when a corresponding URLStreamHandler is installed which is hard to do in a non-intrusive way.

This class loader does not work with Spring resource scanning because the way Spring resource scanning is implemented it works only for folders and JAR files.

ClassLoader classLoader = new PathClassLoader(aPath);

The constructor argument aPath is expected to be a folder. If you have the classes in a JAR create a Zip File System. If you run into Bug 8004789 use the backport for JDK7.

You can optionally pass in a parent ClassLoader in this case parent-first classloading will be used (Java SE default).

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.github.marschall</groupId>
  <artifactId>path-classloader</artifactId>
  <version>1.0.0</version>
</dependency>