Question

I am implementing the ServletContextListener:

public class Listener implements ServletContextListener {

    public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent arg0) {

        ServletContext context=arg0.getServletContext();

        try {
            XMLInputSource in = new XMLInputSource("/home/ahmed/Desktop/AE.xml");
        } catch (IOException e) {

        }
    }
}

Where XMLInputSource is defined in an external jar; that is included into the project (on Eclipse).

However, trying to use this external class, results in an exception:
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError

Any help? does Tomcat require registering the used external libraries, in a special way??

Answer 1

Webapp libraries must be stored in the /WEB-INF/lib directory of the deployed web application. In a WTP eclipse project, you just have to drop the jar in the WebContent/WEB-INF/lib folder, and this jar will automatically be

• in the build classpath of the project
• deployed under /WEB-INF/lib byt Eclipse

So, remove it from your build path, and drop it in WebContent/WEB-INF/lib.

And please, don’t swallow exceptions like you’re doing in your code snippet! If you can’t throws IOException, at least throw a runtime exception wrapping the original IOException.