My program cant find the locale-specific resourcebundle in the programs jar

Question

hi!
i got a serious problem loading my resourcebundles from a jar file.
it seems to be a often-talked-about problem in this forum but i didnt find an answer yet.
please help me with this stuff:
i made two resourcebundles for testing purposes in the following directory hierarchy:
de/juw/jlogin/server/resources/....
Text_de.properties
Text_en.properties
(no default properties wanted)
this class shall load the resourcebundle (de.juw.jlogin.server.ServerTool):
package de.juw.jlogin.server.ServerTool;
public class ServerTool {
private ResourceBundle rb;
private Locale locale = Locale.getDefault();
.... blah blah...
public static ResourceBundle getResources() {
if (rb == null) {
rb = ResourceBundle.getBundle("resources/Text",locale);
return rb;
when i run that program (contained in a jar) it doesnt find the requested properties-file but works fine if all classes and the properties are outside of it.
please help! i already spent two days on searching that forum and other sources without any results. i want that program (including the properties) in a jar-file.
big thanks in advance

Answer 1

I put my properties file and all other resources under in a resources directory in my jar e.g.:
<package>/resources/App.properties
<package>/resources/start.gif
<package>/resources/login.gif
Then in a Properties class I do this to get the properties:
private static Properties getProperties() {
Properties p = new Properties();
try {
p.load(getPropertiesInputStream());
} catch (IOException ioe) {
ioe.printStackTrace();
return p;
public static InputStream getPropertiesInputStream() {
return CProperties.class.getResourceAsStream("App.properties");
And to extract individual properties, something like this:
public static String getReportDirectory() {
Properties p = getProperties();
return p.getProperty("Report.Dir");
NB. Properties file entries should look like this:
Report.Dir=/apps/reports