I am an experienced Python user, and I love how everything is built-in. One feature I use daily is lazy imports. Recently, I was working with Java and wanted to do something similar. Although I couldn't find any good articles on the topic, I managed to figure it out. Here is a sample implementation based on the bcrypt library use case.

Before using lazy import, I would import the function at the top and use it later in the function.

import at.favre.lib.crypto.bcrypt.BCrypt;



// Using it somewhere in the program
String password = “Test@123”
String storedHashString = "$2RandomHashString”
isValid = BCrypt.verifyer().verify(password.toCharArray(), storedHashString.toCharArray()).verified

Above, you can see example code where I am using the Bcrypt library's functions to verify a password. However, I wanted to import Bcrypt lazily. Here is what I did:

// Directly wrote this where I wanted to use this function.
Class<?> bCryptClass = Class.forName("at.favre.lib.crypto.bcrypt.BCrypt"); // Get the instance of the class
Method verifyerMethod = bCryptClass.getMethod("verifyer"); //Get the method  from class.
Object verifyer = verifyerMethod.invoke(null); // Invoke verifyer method and store instance in the variable.
Method verifyMethod = verifyer.getClass().getMethod("verify", char[].class, char[].class);
Object result = verifyMethod.invoke(verifyer, password.toCharArray(), storedHashString.toCharArray()); // Final invoke the verify method.
Boolean ans = (Boolean) result.getClass().getField("verified").get(result); // get the verified field.

Few things to notice here:

• I didn’t import the Bcrypt library at the top.

• It will be imported at runtime. If the jar file is not present, it will throw a ClassNotFoundException. So, add a try-catch block if needed.

• My goal was to achieve this because, in my case, the library might or might not exist in the environment.

Let me know if you have a better way to do this. I hope you find it helpful.
P.S. I'm a noob at Java, so don't quote me on this :P