Properties files with Tomcat 4.0.1

Question

I'm having trouble finding properties files using Class.getResourceAsStream
Properties props = new Properties();
try {
  props.load(Class.class.getResourceAsStream("/Database.properties"));
catch (IOException e) {
  //error reading from stream
}The above code works fine on several web server (including Tomcat 3.2.3), but fails on Tomcat 4.0.1 - the server takes around 50 seconds to return a response, then throws a StackOverflowError. The properties file is in WEB-INF/classes.
Has anybody else had the same problem?

Answer 1

Thanks for the reply Guido.
However, I can't use the ServletContext to load the files I'm after, because the code is part of the data tier and should not be dependent upon the controller (in fact I have no reference to the ServletContext).
If I can't use Class.getResourceAsStream in Tomcat 4, does that mean that any third party APIs that rely on it will fail? - seems a little strange to me!
The Tomcat 4.0 documentation says:
"All unpacked classes and resources in the /WEB-INF/classes directory of your web application archive, plus classes and resources in JAR files under the /WEB-INF/lib directory of your web application archive, are made visible to the containing web application, but to no others."
I would expect "All unpacked classes and resources" to include all unpacked resources (such as properties files)
I've now managed to load the properties file using this code:
props.load(new FileInputStream(getClass().getResource("/Database.properties").getFile()));(don't know why getResource should work when getResourceAsStream doesn't, but that's what appears to be happening).
Now I have a new problem - loading a JDBC driver. I get:
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/jdbc/pool/OracleDataSource
at java.lang.Class.forName0(Native Method)
at java.lang.Class.forName(Class.java:120)
when I call
new OracleConnectionCacheImpl()
but the class does exist, in a zip file (OracleThinClientJDBCDriver_901.zip) in WEB-INF/lib. It looks to me like the oracle code in the lib directory has been found by the ClassLoader, but that Class.forName does not work...eh?!?