What do people use class loading for?

Question

So, every Java text book talks about how flexible Java is since it can load classes at run time. Just cobble together a string and give it to Class.forName(), and

Answer 1

Plugins is the first thing that comes to mind. Java class loading makes it very easy compared to languages like C++.

One point that you may not be aware of is that any Java virtual machine heavily relies on class loading internally. Everytime a reference to, say, a method is seen by the bytecode interpreter, it checks whether the class the method belongs to is already loaded, and if it is not, loads it using the very same mechanism behind Class.forName() before resolving the method. This mecanism is very powerful as any Java application truly acts as a set of replaceable components which are all dynamically loaded. If the VM is well written it can for instance load classes through a custom class loader that fetches classes from the network instead of regular files.

The class loading time depends on the virtual machine implementation, but most rely on this late-binding mechanism that loads a class the first time the VM meets it.