Classloader fun with JDK1.4

The issue is that with JDK1.4.1, if endorsed.dirs is set you may run into many kinds of weird classloading problems. Some classes in the CLASSPATH or in a loader will not be found, even if you place them in jre/lib/ext.



The problem goes away as soon as you remove endorsed.dirs. I still need to find out why is this happening - but for now I fixed jasper to work with crimson ( the parser in JDK1.4 ) and I use tomcat without endorsed.



Update: Remy has the same problem, this time JMX can't be loaded. There is only one solution - stop using endorsed.dirs until Sun fixes it.



Update: It seems one ClassPath attribute in a jar included in endorsed was referencing other jars, and removing that fixes some of the problems. Still - endorsed is supposed to override a number of packages, it shouldn't affect the others.