java - Self exploding and rejaring jar file during execution

Question

I am currently working on a program to make sitting charts for my teacher's classroom. I have put all of the data files in the jar. These are read in and put in to a table. After running the main function of the program, it updates the files to match what the tables values are. I know I need to explode the jar and then rejar it during excution in order to edit the files, but I can't find any explination on how to rejar during excution. Does anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

Short answer:

Put data files outside of the binary and ship together with JAR in a separate folder.

Long one:

It seems like you are approaching the problem from the wrong direction. JAR file is something like an executable (.exe) on Windows platform - a read only binary containing code.

You can (although it is a bad practice) put some resources like data files, multimedia, etc. inside JAR (like you can inside .exe). But a better solution would be to place these resources outside of the binary so you can switch them without recompiling/rebuilding.

If you need to modify the resources on-the-fly while the application is running, you basically have no choice. The data files have to be outside the binary. Once again, you'll never see a Windows .exe file modifying itself while running.