JDBC Connection Driver Problem for Oracle in a J2EE servlet/class

Question

Hi,
I am having a big problem with setting up a JDBC connection with my oracle database, I have been trying to fix it for about 6 hours now with no joy, I have read that many threads about JDBC, class paths etc.. that i dont know which way is up any more!!
Here is the issue:
(Please bare in mind that I am new to this when posting replies)
I have a Web Application set up as a project in the netbeans IDE. I have a servlet which creates a new object call dbaseFunc which is a public class I have wrote and within this class is a function called getAppConfigCon(). The code for this function is below:
public Connection getAppConfigCon()
Connection con = null;
try
Class.forName("oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver");
con = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1521:xe","cavdev", "password");
catch (SQLException e)
e.printStackTrace();
catch (ClassNotFoundException e)
e.printStackTrace(System.out);
return con;
The database is Oracle XE and is installed on the same machine I am developing on, the database is up and I can connect to it via the netbeans IDE database interface after telling it where the driver is (C:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdbc\lib\ojdbc14.zip). Obviously this is just IDE functionality and allows you to browse the database objects from netbeans however I now need to know how to tell the jre where the drivers are, right??
Well like I said multiple forums led me down the classpath route and I have a system environment variable called CLASSPATH set up with the oracle jdbc driver specified as its value, when i run the set command from the command line ( I am running Windows XP Pro) I can see the class path entry in the output as follows:
CLASSPATH=C:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\jdbc\lib\ojdbc14.zip
When I try to run my web app it doesnt assign the connection object with a value, i.e. when i was debugging my con object was null after calling the method mentioned above. After some time debugging i found a ClassNotFoundException was being thrown when the following command was executed:
Class.forName("oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver");
Which I understand is because their is a problem with the class path but what is the problem??? The IDE likes the driver so why doesnt the jre.
I am runnin jdk and jre 1.5, an Oracle XE Database using the netbeans environment.
Some one please help me, I have spent far to much time on this rather than actually working on my project!!!!
Thanks
Keith

Answer 1

Well After 10.5 hrs I actually sorted this myself, the two problems that were throwing me were this:
1. Netbeans does not stop the tomcat server when it finishes running the app, you either have to stop the server from the menu or exit netbeans, until the server restarts it will not pick up on any driver files you add to common/lib
2. You are very right Kiros tomcat does not do .zip files!!!!~~~###
In order to sort this I had to add the oracle driver as a package to my project using the netbeans ide Project > Libraries > New Jar file, this allowed me to access the oracle classes. Then I had to set the server up to deal with the drivers as well, this meant adding the .jar file (not the latest .zip as it wont work) to the bundled tomcat common lib directory and restart the server via the ide (using the start/stop bat files in the tomcat conf directory doesnt work for some reason when its bundled with netbeans!)
Thanks for the help guys but in the end it took 10 hrs a lot of reading and 2 bottles of lucozade to keep the brain goin.
Keith