On Thu, 25 Oct 2001, Nitin Vira wrote: > Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 18:48:15 -0700 > From: Nitin Vira <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: RE: Compilation Error when building Tomcat > > Hi Craig, > > Thanks for your help. I have managed to successfully build the tomcat. > The problems were caused by existence of earlier versions of ant.jar > and servlet.jar in jre/lib/ext folder. Now I am actually wondering, is > it really smart to put jars in jre/lib/ext folder cause i struggled > through a simple build process for 2 days just because of that. >
The important thing to remember about anything you install in jre/lib/ext is that you *cannot* override it. That's OK for a class library that is stable and commonly required, but not a good idea for a tool like Ant. Many others have been bit by having an old version of servlet.jar there. In my personal development environment, I put *nothing* in jre/lib/ext (and also nothing on my CLASSPATH). The $ANT_HOME/bin directory is on my PATH, and I just let Ant assemble classpaths for me as needed, under the control of build.properties files (as you see in the Tomcat build process). This lets me set up global properties in my user home directory, but override them on a per-project basis as needed. Once I started doing everything this way, I've never had problems with classpaths or unintended imports of system extensions. I heartily recommend this approach to any Java developer. > Regards, > Nitin > Craig
