Can anyone please explain the difference between plexus-classworlds and (plain) classworlds?
These two are confusing and can't see the difference. Plexus classworlds contains almost no description. Apparently, a maven-based Java project uses both, I don't understand why.
Is it possible to replace classworlds with plexus-classworlds without much hassle?
I'm gonna answer that, even though the question is so old...
classworlds was migrated to plexus-classworlds, but the documentation on the site doesn't seem to keep up with that... the best docs I've seen was on classworlds 1.1-SNAPSHOT, although the current is plexus-classworlds 2.4.1-SNAPSHOT, and there is hardly any doc there.
if you look at plexus-classworlds, you can also see the original org.codehaus.classworlds package, with class comments like this:
A compatibility wrapper for org.codehaus.plexus.classworlds.launcher.Launcher provided for legacy code
which means that they thought about migration, but of course nothing replaces a thorough test.