Buddy Classloading Equinox Osgi

Buddy class loading offers an integration strategy that does not require modifying the Java code of existing libraries(like hibernate) , thatuse the Class.forName(String) approach to dynamically discover and load classes.The mechanism works as follows:

A Bundle declares that it needs the help of other bundles to load classes The Bundle identifies the kind of help they need by specifying a buddy policy. The policy defines what kind of bundles will be considered to be buddies. When a bundle class loader fails to find a desired class through the normal OSGi delegation model (i.e. Import-Package, Require-Bundle, and local classpath), its buddy policy is invoked The invoked buddy policy discovers a set of buddies and consults each one in turn until either the class is found or the list is exhausted.

There are different buddy policies like registerd,global etc which can be mentioned in the manifest headers.

This buddy policy is spcific to equinox implementaion and may not be found in all Osgi implementataion.

The use cas eof this is each bundle need not mention an import and still can use the class of the bundle. Its use case is in packages like hibernate which do a class.forname on custom code .

http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/Context_Class_Loader_Enhancements