Problem loading JNDI custom resources after migration from WS6.1 to WS 7.0

Question

We have a web application that uses a handful of custom resources that works fine on Sun Web Server 6.1, but after we migrate to 7.0, it fails. The error is that it cannot find the Factory class that we use to create the custom resources. If we put a .jar file in the server's classpath so it can find the Factory class, we get a perplexing error that the custom resources don't match in the config files, when they're identical.
Here are the details:
The error we get when we just do the migration without any changes is:
*WEB7021: Class [edu.umn.cidrap.admin.repository.RepositoryFactory] not found*
After we add the .jar to the server classpath, that goes away, but we get:
*WEB7018: res-type mismatch for resource [bean/UrlRepository]. res-type in server.xml [<package>.UrlRepository] does not match res-type in web.xml [<package>.UrlRepository]*
The <package> matches identically.
Any help with this would be appreciated.
Dave

Answer 1

Yes, it's odd.
I ran across a similar problem upgrading an application in Tomcat, from version 5 to 6. The gist of the problem there seemed to be that the class loaded into JNDI was loaded by the server's classloader while the class using it was loaded by a different classloader (one for the web app) and that, in Java, the same class loaded by different class loaders is different. Or something like that.
The solution that worked there was to make sure that Tomcat could not find the class, which I think caused it to be loaded by the web app class loader. But I'm out of my league on that and my memory is not what it should be.
I don't know if that's the case here, but the error message -- two identical classes generating a message that they're not the same -- brings up that bad memory.
Nonetheless, I'm still stumped.
Dave