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

See the support for Oracle LOB handling in Spring Framework for example. Only because the framework offers specific support for Oracle you probably don't want to deploy an Oracle datasource as dependency for your e.g. MySQL projects. Therefore you load the Oracle drivers reflectively in the scope of an instance of the LOB handler.