Java applet loading images from external jars

Question

I have a jar on a server, and users should be able to develop extensions for it. Therefore the jars main class should be extended and some resources should be added to a second user created jar which will be loaded from another server or locally. Now I have problems accessing the resources (images) from the user loaded jars. Heres is the structure:

My Server:
  game.jar containing
    game.class
    images.class
    ...
    image1.png (...)

Local:
  user.jar containing:
    user.class extends game
    userimage.png

The extension is loaded via Greasemonkey, it modifies the "archive" attribute to "/home/username/user.jar, game.jar" and the "code" attribute to "user.class". The user should be able to overwrite already defined images. If the image does not exist in game.jar, it is loaded correctly from user.jar. But the images loaded early in the game are always loaded from the game.jar, others seem to be overwritten correctly by the user. Is there a way to make sure they are always loaded in the correct order? This might be because of some caching mechanism. Because Greasemonkey removes the game from the page, changes the archive and code and reinsert it, the game is loaded without a mod for a brief second. In that time, images are loaded as expected from game jar, but those are the ones not being overwritable by the user. But how to avoid it?

Another thing: If I overwrite the "run" method in user.class, the game is unable to load any image at all. Not from the user.jar and not from the game.jar. Java doesn't find the image, as the URL object "getClass().getResource(imagename)" returns with null. I tried to overwrite the image.class, but that doesn't fix the problem, unless I overwrite every class from game.class involved into calling the image.class

Answer 1

I don't think having greasemonkey monkey with the <applet> tag is necessarily the best approach here. Perhaps you should actually have the greasemonkey script communicate with your applet and tell it what is wanted of it?

Of course, that leaves the question of how to have the applet wait for the script, but only when there is such a script...