[Almost] Typical ClassNotFoundException

Question

I have the typical newbie problem with the ClassNotFoundException... only it's not quite that simple.
First, I made the unfortunate choice to use Windows but I have been compiling and running programs from a Java 6 HowTo book successfully. One of the later chapters called for using the XOM library so I installed the package. When I tried to run the samples I got "could not find the main class: xom-samples.jar:xom-1.1.jar" but this is not about xom (I think).
After trying unsuccessfully to fix the problem I decided to go ahead with the example in my book which worked but when I went to the next example I got this:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: nu/xom/ParsingExcepti
on
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: nu.xom.ParsingException
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(Unknown Source)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(Unknown Source)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(Unknown Source)
Could not find the main class: DomainWriter. Program will exit.
DomainWriter is the example application which is in the same location as all the other programs I've run successfully. I tried putting it in my classpath along with the xom jars but to no avail.
I also saw something somewhere that led me to believe that putting the required jars in \jre\lib\ext which I also tried.
Could it be that I just needed to reboot the system, not just the command window for these changes to take effect? If so, which were the necessary ones?
TIA,
Bruce

Answer 1

Try running the XOM sample from the same directory where you have extracted the XOM distribution. Here's an example (on UNIX though) which worked:
bss@tomato:~/work/XOM$ ls
apidocs    classes15  fatsrc    lib          overview.html  README.txt  src15     Todo.txt     xom.graffle
build.xml  data       lgpl.txt  LICENSE.txt  project.xml    src         test.xml  xom-1.1.jar  xom-samples.jar
bss@tomato:~/work/XOM$
bss@tomato:~/work/XOM$ java -classpath xom-samples.jar:xom-1.1.jar nu.xom.samples.PrettyPrinter test.xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<root xml:base="file:///home/bss/work/XOM/test.xml">
    <ch1 a="44">This is test</ch1>
    <ch1 a="55">Second one</ch1>
</root>
bss@tomato:~/work/XOM$