Friday, September 15, 2006

ClassLoaders and Packaging - J2EE Servers

I bet there is not a single J2EE developer who has not had nightmares trying to solve problems regarding ClassCastException when the J2EE application is deployed on the AppServer.

Resolving such problems require a sound knowledge of Java ClassLoading mechanism. In my previous post here, I had described the class loader heirarchy of standard JRE.

After this, we need to understand the class-loading mechanisms of the J2EE AppServer we are using. The classloading mechanisms of different appservers are different and also highly configurable through configuration files of the appserver. For e.g. make the classloaders execute child-first loading or the default parent-first loading, configure the same classloader for all modules in a ear file, etc.

Here is a good article that explains the fundamentals of ClassLoading in some J2EE servers:
http://www.theserverside.com/tt/articles/article.tss?l=ClassLoading

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