Are are using Tomcat 4.1.27 and Oracle 8 and are developing servlet based applications.

We have lots of apps that share the base set libraries (JARs). We classically put our library jars (this includes Oracle, Tapestry, etc.) in <TOMCAT>/shared/lib (plus the Oracle jar goes in <TOMCAT>/common/lib).

After much experimentation, I finally determined that hibernate2.jar MUST live in <TOMCAT>/webapps/<webapp>/WEB-INF/lib -- it cannot live in shared/lib. If it is in shared/lib, Hibernate cannot find the hibernate.cfg.xml or <table>.hbm.xml files.

What is up with this? Why must hibernate2.jar live in WEB-INF/lib? All of Hibernate's support jar files can live in <TOMCAT>/shared/lib, only hibernate2.jar seems "special". This is the first jar I have ever come across that seems special in this way at this point.

I finally have Hibernate "running". How if I can figure out why Hibernator seems brain damaged I will be happy, but, that is a topic for another forum.

Thanks for your help.
Kevin

It is due to classloader strategy "ask parent first"
common/lib stuffs are loaded by a parent classoader of the webapp.
This parent classloader cannot see child classloader classpath.

When loading resources, hibernate use the classloader which load hibernate classes, so it cannot find config files.

It may have been better to use the thread context classloader to load those resources. But changing it now would hurts lots of people.

Have you also used struts? It has this same problem!