Find Java classes implementing an interface [duplicate]

Awhile ago, I put together a package for doing what you want, and more. (I needed it for a utility I was writing). It uses the ASM library. You can use reflection, but ASM turned out to perform better.

I put my package in an open source library I have on my web site. The library is here: http://software.clapper.org/javautil/. You want to start with the with ClassFinder class.

The utility I wrote it for is an RSS reader that I still use every day, so the code does tend to get exercised. I use ClassFinder to support a plug-in API in the RSS reader; on startup, it looks in a couple directory trees for jars and class files containing classes that implement a certain interface. It's a lot faster than you might expect.

The library is BSD-licensed, so you can safely bundle it with your code. Source is available.

If that's useful to you, help yourself.

Update: If you're using Scala, you might find this library to be more Scala-friendly.

Spring can do this for you...

BeanDefinitionRegistry bdr = new SimpleBeanDefinitionRegistry();
ClassPathBeanDefinitionScanner s = new ClassPathBeanDefinitionScanner(bdr);

TypeFilter tf = new AssignableTypeFilter(CLASS_YOU_WANT.class);
s.addIncludeFilter(tf);
s.scan("package.you.want1", "package.you.want2");       
String[] beans = bdr.getBeanDefinitionNames();

N.B. The TypeFilter is important if you want the correct results! You can also use exclusion filters here instead.

The Scanner can be found in the spring-context jar, the registry in spring-beans, the type filter is in spring-core.