SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ENABLING ATOMIC CLASS LOADING IN AN APPLICATION SERVER ENVIRONMENT

Disclosed is a system and method for enabling dynamic class reloading in the application server environment. Users may specify class versionability by specifying a list of explicitly versionable classes; and the application server(s) may execute a background task which operates periodically to check modified versionable classes, and cause the classes to be reloaded.Administrators may specify a set of class files to be treated as a “bundle”. When the bundle is deployed, a deployer manager may obtain a lock, e.g. a semaphore, referred to as the “dirtyClassListLock”. Once this lock is obtained, the deployer manager may copy all the class files in the bundle from a deployment environment to their appropriate runtime locations. After the runtime locations have been updated, the deployer manager may release the dirtyClassListLock. According to this method, the background task that checks for and reloads modified classes may also have to obtain the dirtyClassListLock in order to run. Thus, the background task will discover and reload class files in the bundle atomically.