This is a classloader issue.
As per the Javadocs to Class.forName
, you are looking up the class using the classloader of the current class. As your main class, this will be the JVM's bootstrap classloader (and will more or less just include the standard library plus anything you provided as a -cp
command line argument). It is not going to delegate to the classloader that you instantiated as a local variable, and so will not return classes that that classloader could find.
If you were to specify the classloader explicitly, and call
Class.forName("HelloWorld", true, clazzloader)
then the classloader you just created will be searched instead and your class should be found.