Question

I deploy a WAR file in Tomcat. In addition I have a JAR file.

Is it possible to make the classes in the JAR file available to services in the WAR file without changing the WAR file, or does it have be added to the WAR’s WEB-INF/lib?

I’ve tried adding the JAR to lib/, but it doesn’t work. Spring fails with org.springframework.beans.factory.BeanCreationException » java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError upon startup.

EDIT

I realized that I might have made myself an unsolvable and architectually ugly problem. Here’s the thing:

• The WAR has a reference <bean id="warService" class="com.war.Service" />
• My JAR has a class com.mystuff.MyService that extends com.war.Service
• I have replaced the bean reference with <bean id="warService" class="com.mystuff.MyService" />
• Spring fails with java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com.war.Service

Answer 1

Or you could put it(your jar file) in your Tomcat root directory under lib folder. Chk this out :

http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-6.0-doc/class-loader-howto.html

Per your edit

1. Something is wrong with your jar
2. You have mistaken the fully qualified class name in your application context

I’ve happen to have mysql-connector-java-5.0.8-bin jar in my lib folder. And just for test I’ve put this in my application context :

<bean id="driver" class="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver" />

Worked as charm, check those two cases above