Class Loading Strategy for Security MBeans

Question

Hi, can someone point me to a good reference or explain how security mbeans load referenced classes? I'm trying to reference my auditor class, which is archived in an audit.jar, from within my authentication provider mbean implementation class. I've added the attribute class-path:audit.jar in the manifest file of the mbean jar file containing the authentication provider class. Every time I start the server I get a "NoClassDefFoundError" exception. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Someone else can probably answer with more authority, but I think that statement is true because Java 2 introduced context class loaders, or at least formalized the hierarchical relationship between context class loaders.
Each thread by definition has a context class loader, possibly (probably) through inheritance from its parent thread.
According to the API doc, Class.forName() loads a class using the current class's classLoader, whereas getContextClassLoader().loadClass() loads a class using the thread's context class loader.
I think there could be cases where a context class loader could have access to resoures that the class's class loader doesn't. If anyone can shed more light on this, that would be helpful.
There's some discussion of this here:
http://java.sun.com/products/jndi/tutorial/beyond/misc/classloader.html, mainly in regards to JNI.