Integrating sun's JdbcOdbcDriver into Websphere 5?

Question

Hello all, i'm in the middle of migrating an application that was running on tomcat to WAS5.1. All my database connection are working except for the ones that use the JdbcOdbcDriver. As tomcat used sun's jdk I had no problems before but now that I'm tied to IBMs bundled jre I'm at a loss of what to do. I don't like it but i added Sun's rt.jar file that contains the driver class to my WAS classpath but I get some sort of initialization error:
java.lang.NullPointerException
     at sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver.initialize(JdbcOdbcDriver.java:436)
     at sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver.connect(JdbcOdbcDriver.java:153)
     at java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection(DriverManager.java:538)
All i really want is my old odbc driver bridges to work for .txt .dbf and .csv querying. Can someone give me some suggestions on what to do? Websphere's google group hasn't seem to discuss this issue since 2003 so maybe i'm on the wrong track entirely. Here is a example of the code i'm using just incase you are curious to the means:
case Constants.MS_DBF:
     Class.forName( "sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver" );
     StringBuffer dbsrc_dbf = new StringBuffer();
     dbsrc_dbf.append("jdbc:odbc:DRIVER={Microsoft dBase Driver (*.dbf)};");
     dbsrc_dbf.append("UserCommitSync=Yes;Threads=3;Statistics=0;SafeTransactions=0;");
     dbsrc_dbf.append("PageTimeout=5;MaxScanRows=8;MaxBufferSize=2048;FIL=dBase 5.0;");
     dbsrc_dbf.append("DriverId=533;Deleted=1;DefaultDir=");
     dbsrc_dbf.append(db);
     connection = DriverManager.getConnection( dbsrc_dbf.toString(), "", "" );
break;
Thanks in advance for help on this. graeme.

Answer 1

try this if you're still having problems(think you already solvet it, anyway...)
env.put(..);
env.put(..);
System.setProperty("javax.net.ssl.trustStore",FILE_JKS_PATH);
it worked fine for me,even if it was a websphere 4.* version.