James Arendt wrote:

> I'll be quite honest I'm quite a Ruby newbie and haven't had much
> experience with it yet. What I have done up to now with Ruby has given
> me the impression that I'll grow to love it.

Yes, you will :-).

> In Java, one can use Class.forName or a classloader directly such as
> the RMIClassLoader. So, to load class myPackage.Simple it would be:
> 
> Class.forName("myPackage.Simple");
> 
> Where is an equivalent feature in Ruby to be found?

Since Ruby execution is totally dynamic, the equivalent, I guess, would be 
simply using "require" as necessary.

For example, if you had code like ...

   if x < 10
      require 'simple'
      ...
   end

then the classes defined in simple.rb (which could be anywhere in your ruby 
library path) would be loaded if x is less than 10, but not if it wasn't.

You can also (and I only found this out from the mailing list the other 
day) use "load 'simple.rb'" if you want to always re-load the code in 
simple.rb, as opposed to using "require", which will only load it the first 
time the given file is "require"ed.  That may be closer to what you were 
looking for, I guess.