What is the concept of endorsed directory??

[Pankaj Poshirkar]

Dear All,

Can anyone let me know what is the concept of endorsed directory in java?
Suppose I have a class called Some.class which is present in two jar files named file1.jar and file2.jar.

Suppose I have this directory structure:

lib\
lib\endorsed

And suppose I have kept file1.jar in the 'lib' folder and file2.jar in lib\endorsed, which version of Some.class will get called? From file1.jar or from file2.jar?

Thanks in advance,
Pankaj

[Ernest Friedman-Hill]

For a very few special packages -- the org.omg CORBA packages, for instance -- you can override the version that comes with your JRE by dropping the jars into an "endorsed" directory. These are packages that implement "endorsed standards" -- basically things that get shipped with the JDK but that are governed by some third-party standards body. Anyway, this only works for packages on this short list, and in general, most jars in such a directory are just going to be ignored.

[Ulf Dittmer]

JAXB and JAX-WS are probably the packages most frequently updated in that way, and JAXP to a lesser degree.