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

Servlet containers like Tomcat read your war/webapp configuration file from WEB-INF/web.xml and load your Servlet/Filter/etc. subclasses based on the String values you put in the XML file. For database connections, they pull the class name to load from your configuration, e.g. "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver" for MySQL.