> Sure - maven does the work of resolving/flattening the dependency graph and downloading the libs - but it simply isn't a classloader. Well, of course, but wh

> Sure - maven does the work of resolving/flattening the dependency graph and downloading the libs - but it simply isn't a classloader. Well, of course, but when was the last time you manually configured your classloader? How divorced are your classloaders from Maven, practically speaking? (That's what I was getting at - I wasn't trying for some pedantic sort of "maven constructs my java.lang.ClassLoader objects"-type thing.) By manually, I mean supplying a list of .jar files and folders, or writing code that pumped classes into a custom classloader? Practically speaking, for any non-toy-sized project most people don't bother with that business anymore. They make deployment units, uber/shadow jars, or launch from a tool like Gradle that rolls their classloader for them from a Maven repository. > That said, it might be possible to write a custom classloader which uses some bits of maven internally (provided there is a package to GAV index somewhere). Ant, Gradle, and to a lesser extent, Maven serve as fine Java application launchers in that their dependency resolution engines can be targeted at the classpath-related arguments on the java and javac command lines.