Question

I am from .net world. I remember .net will immediately complain if you build with one dll but supply a different dll at run time.

I am now adding some hadoop reference to my project and find the following article.

http://answers.mapr.com/questions/364/maven-repository-for-mapr-jar-files

I just don’t understand how this happens.

Java can build with one jar but run with a different jar?

Thanks

Answer 1

yes. this is often the case with APIs (you compile the API, but at runtime you may run with a newer version of the API which may be included with the implementation). everything will work out fine as long as the classes/method prototypes referenced in your compiled code are unchanged from the jar you compiled against.

For a specific definition of compatibility, see binary compatibility (thanks to @MiserableVariable for the link).