Comparing two classes by its types or class names

Question

There is need to compare two objects based on class they implement? When to compare using getClass() and when getClass().getName()? Is there any differ

Answer 1

I ran into a problem comparing two classes using .equals. The above provided solution is not entirely accurate. Class does not implement Comparable.

Class references are not necessarily true singletons within a JVM because you can have multiple ClassLoaders.

I was writing a Maven plugin that was digging annotations out of beans after compile. The plugin had one classloader and I had my own classloader. When comparing two classes of the same name from different loaders the comparison would fail.

The implementation of Object.equals looks like this:

public boolean More ...equals(Object obj) {
       return (this == obj);
}

So you will be comparing references.

If you are comparing classes and you know for sure there will only be one classloader involved you can safely use .equals or c1 == c2 but if you are not sure you should compare by name:

if(c1.getName().equals(c2.getName()) {
   ...
}