extraClasspath set from jetty-web.xml is ignored

Oleg,

I am trying to reproduce the issue and getting an exception "java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: bad version number in .class file" for some reason. Could you please provide the source code so that I can build it here?

Thanks,
Michael

Michael,
Source code files are in the war file (in classes folder).

The source code for class A is:
public class A {
}

The source code for class TestServlet is:
import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet;

public class TestServlet extends HttpServlet {

@Override
public void init() throws ServletException

}

Oleg,

I have rebuilt your web application and was able to start it successfully using the extraClasspath setting of WebAppContext.

The context configuration file should have the following minimum configuration, because war property is mandatory.

<Configure class="org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext">
   <Set name="war"><SystemProperty name="jetty.home" default="."/>/webapps/qwe.war</Set>
  <Set name="extraClasspath">c:/tmp/</Set>
</Configure>

Please note that Jetty 6.1.x is compiled to be compatible with Java 1.4 with some modules targeted for Java 1.5. For this reason, while you can use Java 1.6 to run Jetty 6, you should compile web applications that will run in Jetty 6 using the following java compiler compatibility options.

javac -source 1.5 -target 1.5 A.java

Thanks,
Michael

Oleg,

The problem is that the jetty-web.xml file is read and parsed as the last step before the webapp goes into service. By that time, the classpath of the WebAppClassLoader has already been established. So you are right, in that the extraClasspath in a jetty-web.xml file is ignored. As Michael says, if you put it in a context file for the webapp instead, it will be used. We'll make a note to improve the documentation.

cheers
Jan

Guys,

Do you really think that this issue is resolved?
I don't see any documentation changes.
And what is more important, I don't see any way for a Jetty user who needs an additional classpath to accomplish this task by following your documentation in its current state.
Neither http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JETTY/jetty-web.xml nor http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JETTY/Classloading mention that the war property is mandatory.

BTW, do you think it is a clever approach to configure the war file name from within a war file?

Oleg,

As Jan pointed out, you cannot configure the extraClasspath attribute from jetty-web.xml because by the time it is processed web application classloader has already been configured.

When I was able to successfully configure the extraClasspath, I did it using qwe.xml file located in

/contexts/ directory, that does require the war property to be set in order to configure the context correctly.

We are going to make changes to the documentation to reflect that.

-Michael

Sorry, I'm really lost in jetty terminology.
I think that it must be documented that jetty-web.xml is NOT a context configuration file despite the fact that it configures WebAppContext

Oleg,

that's a really good comment! We (the developers) know what we mean by context configuration file... but it takes fresh eyes to point out that it is not obvious as many things contribute to the configuration of a context.

What we really mean when we say "context configuration file" is the file that is scanned for by the context deployer (or now the context app provider of the deployment
manager).

We really do need to make that clearer. We also do need to point out when each type of file get's evaluated during the deployment lifecycle.

thanks for the insight!

So, almost one year has passed since the changes to documentation were to be made.
As of now the documentation (http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JETTY/Classloading) states:

========
If you need to add some jars or classes that for some reason are not in $jetty.home/lib nor inside your webapp's WEB-INF/lib or WEB-INF/classes, you can add them directly to your webapp:

<Configure class="org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext">
...
<Set name="extraClasspath">../my/classes:../my/jars/special.jar:../my/jars/other.jar</Set>
...
========

Is that excerpt still being totally wrong and misleading?
If yes - why can't it just be deleted not to deceive Jetty users?

closing resolved issues