Reading resources of another jar file

Question

I have three java jar files which can be run independently. Each file contains images resource. I want each of the programs to be able to read resource from each other program. Let's assume they are in the same directory, when the program "A" is run I want to be able to read resources file inside file "B" or "C".

Answer 1

There may be a more elegant way of doing this with classloaders/etc.

However, JAR files are simply ZIP files with a different name. Assuming you know in advance the location of the folder in the JAR (probably src/main/resources ), you can simply unzip and read from there.

The class ZipEntry will allow you to do this, without needing any extra libraries: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/util/zip/ZipEntry.html

Like I say, however, there is likely a better way of doing this.