After looking into a related post on Stack Overflow, I found there to be a variety of different tools at my disposal to do "plugin" style development.

First, I was close with "API" but the correct solution is an "SPI" or Service Provider Interface. I found a very good post describing the difference on Stack Overflow. To summarize: API is a set of classes/interfaces/methods that you CALL and USE to achieve a goal. Compared to a SPI which is a set of classes/interfaces/methods that you EXTEND and IMPLEMENT to achieve a goal.

There are many ways I am still looking through to find the right solution for me, but it seems that using Java's ClassLoader or URLClassLoader will be the way to go. Oracle provides a great tutorial on how to implement this here.

There are many tools out there that can provide support for this such as Apache Aries and OSGi.

After looking into a related post on Stack Overflow, I found there to be a variety of different tools at my disposal to do "plugin" style development.

First, I was close with "API" but the correct solution is an "SPI" or Service Provider Interface. I found a very good post describing the difference on Stack Overflow. To summarize: API is a set of classes/interfaces/methods that you CALL and USE to achieve a goal. Compared to a SPI which is a set of classes/interfaces/methods that you EXTEND and IMPLEMENT to achieve a goal.

There are many ways I am still looking through to find the right solution for me, but it seems that using Java's ClassLoader or URLClassLoader will be the way to go. Oracle provides a great tutorial on how to implement this here.

There are many tools out there that can provide support for this such as Apache Aries and OSGi.