Restart myself - can I reinitialize everything from scratch?

Question

I have something like this:

public static final String path;
static {
    path = loadProperties(\"config.conf\").getProperty(\"path\");
}

public static void mai         


        

Answer 1

I'm accepting Peter Lawrey answer but post a complete example for anyone to use!

I'm not going to use this in production code... there are other ways of doing it!

public class Test {

    public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception {
        start();
        Thread.sleep(123);
        start();
    }

    private static void start() throws Exception {

        ClassLoader cl = new ClassLoader(null) {
            protected java.lang.Class findClass(String name) 
            throws ClassNotFoundException {
                try{
                    String c = name.replace('.', File.separatorChar) +".class";
                    URL u = ClassLoader.getSystemResource(c);
                    String classPath = ((String) u.getFile()).substring(1);
                    File f = new File(classPath);

                    FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(f);
                    DataInputStream dis = new DataInputStream(fis);

                    byte buff[] = new byte[(int) f.length()];
                    dis.readFully(buff);
                    dis.close();

                    return defineClass(name, buff, 0, buff.length, null);

                } catch(Exception e){
                    throw new ClassNotFoundException(e.getMessage(), e);
                }
            }
        };

        Class t = cl.loadClass("Test$Restartable");
        Object[] args = new Object[] { new String[0] };
        t.getMethod("main", new String[0].getClass()).invoke(null, args);
    }

    public static class Restartable {

        private static final long argument = System.currentTimeMillis();

        public static void main(String args[]) throws Exception {
            System.out.println(argument);
        }
    }
}