What is happening in the code

Question

What is happening here:
Class.forName("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver").newInstance();
I use it and it works fine but I have no idea what is going on there?

Answer 1

Class.forName() loads the given class. In itself, that isn't interesting. The beef lies in that loading a class executes any static blocks in that class.
If you had the source to com.mysql.jdbc.Driver, it would probably start something like:
public class Driver
    static {
        Driver driver_object = new Driver();
        java.sql.DriverManager.registerDriver(driver_object);
}The static block does the actual work of registering the driver. Class.forName() is really just a bit of a hack to get that static block executed.
The newInstance() call is customary because there is an old rumor that some buggy JDBC driver somewhere is missing the static block, and has the registerDriver() call in a Driver() object constructor instead. A belt and suspenders kind of thing.