JForumBaseServlet.init can't load dao.driver. Did I break tomcat 5.5?

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

I have been tinkering with JForum quite a bit to tie it into an existing web-app.

I wanted to add some new DAO classes, so I subclassed the net.jforum.dao.mysql.MysqlDataAccessDriver, and changed mysql.properties
dao.driver=org.2wav.dao.mysql.MyDataAccessDriver

The code builds, org.2wav.dao.mysql.MyDataAccessDriver appears to be in the WEB-INF/classes directory.

In JForumBaseServlet.java, this code now throws a NoClassDefFoundException:

// Start the dao.driver implementation
DataAccessDriver.init((DataAccessDriver)Class.forName(
SystemGlobals.getValue(ConfigKeys.DAO_DRIVER)).newInstance());

I suspected something is wrong with my custom DataAccessDriver, however, when I change dao.driver back to the original settings, i get the same class def error. Code that worked before is now busted. I have restarted tomcat, and even tried changing the code to directly instantiate net.jforum.dao.mysql.MysqlDataAccessDriver but that throws java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError.

Any ideas what I might have broken, that JForumBaseServlet.init no longer can load dao.driver?
[originally posted on jforum.net by 2wav]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

hhmm..

are you able to instantiate the class by hand? for example, create a .jsp file with the following contents:

Class.forName("org.2wav.dao.mysql.MyDataAccessDriver").newInstance();

and execute it. It works?

Rafael
[originally posted on jforum.net by Rafael Steil]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

Bad class path for login authenticator in global properties was causing the DataAccessDriver to fail on static initialization.

Thanks for your response. I wish I had stuck with it just a bit longer before calling cavalry.
[originally posted on jforum.net by Anonymous]