How does one go about and try to find all subclasses of a given class (or all implementors of a given interface) in Java?
As of now, I have a method to do this, but I find it quite inefficient (to say the least).
The method is:
- Get a list of all class names that exist on the class path
- Load each class and test to see if it is a subclass or implementor of the desired class or interface
In Eclipse, there is a nice feature called the Type Hierarchy that manages to show this quite efficiently.
How does one go about and do it programmatically?