Hello all, sorry this is long, but it takes time to explain, I'm having a frustrating issue with JSP files and trying to import our custom classes. Originally the classes were developed when Tomcat 3 was out and being used, so putting all of our compiled (*.class) files into "webapps\WEB-INF\classes" worked fine -- the JSPs all ran and could see & import the classes just dandy. When we upgraded to Tomcat 4, the classes were no longer visible. After some research and testing, we found that placing a: <%@ page import="MyClass" %> At the top of each JSP file solved the problem. Kinda cumbersome to add that for every class that we used, but it worked.
Now we are attempting to upgrade to Tomcat 5 and are again having class loading issues. The import line is causing the following error: D:\Jakarta5\work\Catalina\166.70.225.99\_\org\apache\jsp\site_jsp.java:8 : '.' expected import MyClass; Obviously the compiler is expecting a package name in order to import external classes (which I realize is probably a function of javac, not of tomcat). The first thing I did was to convert our entire class library to packages (it originally wasn't when it was developed several years ago). I then copied these classes to the WEB-INF\classes folder and the application began running. However, the next problem arose when some of our code was doing dynamic class instantiation (using Class.forName()) since all of the class names had changed. So, of course, I fixed that throughout the code, which brought me to my present position: serialization. Many of our classes contain state information which we serialize to a database. However, now that all of the class names have changed, we cannot deserialize any of our existing objects because the class names don't match (ClassCastException is what's being thrown, if I remember right). Realizing that we cannot lose our serialized objects (since they contain all of our customers' data), I have been looking into other options. Some of the things I have tried are putting the class files (the original -- before repackaging them) into JAR files, changing the scratch directory for compilation in hopes that the compiler will find our classes, and moving classes into various folders to see if they can be found. So, now that I've spoke my novel, here's my question: Is there a way I can simply allow Tomcat to import *.class from "webapps\WEB-INF\classes\" and have them all available to my JSP (like it used to work in Tomcat 3)? The problem is simple -- I need my non-packaged classes to be available to my .JSP files. Yes, I realize that we should have the files all in the same package from the beginning, but we don't. Our hope is that finding a solution that will make it work will cost us less time/money than rebuilding all of the serialized objects in our customers' databases (which I haven't thought of a good way to do that yet, either). Any help or suggestions that anyone has is GREATLY appreciated. I've been fairly impressed with the Jakarta community as I've used the products over the past several years. Thanks in advance, Jeff P.S. Theoretically it shouldn't make a difference, but this is being deployed on a Windows Server 2003 machine. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
