Greetings, For the past few-several days I have been scouring the internet and this list extensively to no avail. First I'll describe the error and then give as much detail as possible about the structure of our web-app project as possible. Before I came to work on this project, it was running fine on a tomcat 4.1 server by simply having all class files in a single jar file, however it wasn't being managed very well and was being developed in Windows even though our deployment was to be in Red Hat, so I decided to get the project into Netbeans under a Red Hat VM with tomcat 5.5 and after a day had it compiling and reporting no errors (there were plenty of errors when first imported into netbeans). But ever since then, its always been the same problem with tomcat not being able to detect the class necessary for loading the GUI.
After proper authentication with a db2 database, our servlets call up an html page with an embedded applet in a new window (we've even tried loading in the same window). This applet has given me a ClassNotFoundException in every instance I have tried. I am using Netbeans 5.0 and it correctly places all class files in the classes directory under WEB-INF with correct package directory appearance and all jar library files in the lib directory. All of our program's custom classes now belong to a single package, including the servlets (originally all custome classes had no package), 3rd party classes are in their appopriate packages as well (they are now in jars in the lib dir), and the whole thing compiles without any errors. The tomcat servers also starts without any errors, and both the standalone and bundled Netbeans tomcats always give this same error in every instance as well. The Netbeans output tab shows that the user is being appropriately authenticated after logging in and checking against the database within our servlet (which also uses other classes within our package). After attempting the load the applet the only thing in netbeans which indicates a problem has occurred is upon inspection of the HTTP requests, which shows that two requests failed: /ONLINEBOM/olb/HomeMenu.class and /ONLINEBOM/olb/HomeMenu/class.class. The former seems like it should be correct, since I assume netbeans automatically sets correct classpaths and such. The latter is an inexistant file whose lookup doesn't really seem to affect this particular problem. the standard structure of the files is as follows: -the olb package is in WEB-INF/classes/olb/*.class -all 3rd party libraries are in WEB-INF/lib/*.jar -the web.xml file with the servlet declaration stuff is in WEB-INF -html files are in the root directory of the project the html file which calls the applet contains the following in its body: <applet CODEBASE="olb" CODE="HomeMenu.class" WIDTH="400" HEIGHT="280"></applet> I have also tried not using codebase and placing in CODE both " olb.HomeMenu.class" and "olb/HomeMenu.class". I have also tried using the ARCHIVE options when trying this and other attempts described below. I have tried the following besides the standard for placement of classes/packages: -placing all classes in a single jar file (in lib, classes, or even in the root folder for the webapp where the html is) -placing our classes in one jar, 3rd party classes in 2 other jars (in lib, classes, etc.) -placing all classes in the directory structure without the use of jars (in classes directory and lib) -placing all classes/jars in the shared/classes and shared/lib tomcat directories (when attempted with the standalone tomcat server) Is this just a simple CLASSPATH problem? I assumed it wasn't from reading that tomcat sets its own classpath anyway. Is it entirely the fault of the servlet? Is there some other configuration settings I'm entirely missing here? I would really, completely, and utterly appreciate some help which could get this poor web-app back on its feet and ready for continued development. Thanks! Eric Harbeston
