I know it really late for another answer but I just wanted to share what helped me at the end. It will also load resources/files from the absolute path of the file system (not only the classpath's).
public class ResourceLoader {
public static URL getResource(String resource) {
final List<ClassLoader> classLoaders = new ArrayList<ClassLoader>();
classLoaders.add(Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader());
classLoaders.add(ResourceLoader.class.getClassLoader());
for (ClassLoader classLoader : classLoaders) {
final URL url = getResourceWith(classLoader, resource);
if (url != null) {
return url;
}
}
final URL systemResource = ClassLoader.getSystemResource(resource);
if (systemResource != null) {
return systemResource;
} else {
try {
return new File(resource).toURI().toURL();
} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
return null;
}
}
}
private static URL getResourceWith(ClassLoader classLoader, String resource) {
if (classLoader != null) {
return classLoader.getResource(resource);
}
return null;
}
}