JDBC use the way of registry to manage its drivers by the method of DriverManager.registerDriver(...)

This method is static one, usually there’re several ways to invoke it:

1. in your code, write Class.forName("com.xx.jdbc.Driver");, this is a way to load the specified Driver class explicitly. You can get the effect because the jdbc driver venders usually get the registerDriver(..) method invoked just in the static block of the Driver implementation class.
2. you can tell the JVM to load which driver by setting the jdbc.drivers system property.
3. Another way is supported by the ServiceLocator mode. This needs the jdbc driver vender to package their jdbc driver jar following the service provider convention.

If you see the source code of JDBC API, you will find that the behaviours of way 2) and 3) are defined by the DriverManager.loadInitialDrivers() static method. So you needn’t do anything in your code to register Driver.

For example:

• DB2 JDBC driver db2jcc4.jar is packaged following the service provider convention, so you needn’t invoke Class.forName(..) in your code.
• MySQL JDBC driver mysql-connector-java.jar uses the same way.