How can I access the oracle/sql server jdbc driver class files from my cust

Question

I have a war file in which I have custom DataSource i.e mypackage.Datasource class. Its basically the need of my application. In this class we connect to datasource and link some of our programming artifacts .
I have deployed the oracle jdbc driver and deploy my application as ear with datasources.xml in the meta inf file. Inspite of that my code fails to load the jdbc driver classes.
Here is the extract of the code :
        Class.forName("oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver").newInstance();
         String url = "jdbc:oracle:thin:@dataserver:1521:orcl";
        Connection conn = DriverManager.getConnection(url, "weblims3", "labware");
        if(conn != null){
          out.println("the connection to the database have been achieved");
        out.println("conn object achived= " + conn);
Class.forname fails in this case. I can see the ojdbc5.jar the driver jar in usr\sap\CE1\J00\j2ee\cluster\bin\ext\ojdbc5  . I even put the ojdbc.jar in web-inf/lib and application lib but does not help at all. Hope I have explained my problem clearly.
I deployed the jdbc driver in the name of ojdbc5 .
I am stuck here. It will be great help if anyone can help me in this. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Bent,
You can access the database from your Java portlet, just like from any other Java/JSP environment. Yes, you can use JDBC, as well as BC4J.
The Discussion Forum portlet was built using BC4J, take a look at it's source to see how it was done.
Also, check out Re: BC4J Java portlet anyone?, it contains a lot of useful information too.
Peter