Reading files from within helper classes

Question

From within a servlet, I can get the servlet context to get a path to the "web" directory of my project and easily access properties files for my project. If I create another package in my project to hold helper classes that perform some specific function and want to create and/or read from a properties file, I get a path to the bin directory of my servlet container:
Servlet Path: D:\Documents and Settings\Josh\My Documents\Josh\Projects\ServletSandBox\build\web\
Helper Class File Path: D:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache Tomcat 6.0.14\bin\test
I'd like to develop my helper packages as reusable APIs, so they're not tied directly to my project or to a servlet in general, but I'd like the properties files to stay somewhere in my project folder, preferably in the WEB-INF directory with the servlet's own specific properties file.
I can't figure out the best way to handle this. I wanted to just be able to pass the helper class a String if somebody wanted to specify a filename other than the default filename. Does it make sense to specify a file URL instead? Is there any other way to get the calling servlet's context path without having to pass in a variable?
Thanks

Answer 1

It seems that the helper API shouldn't need to be given a path to its own config file. I would like to have code that will load the file regardless of whether or not its in a stand alone java app or a servlet. Whenever the helper API is jarred up and imported into my servlet, it can't find the config file unless it's in the "D:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache Tomcat 6.0.14\bin\test" directory. OR, if I use the current thread to get the loader, it will locate it in the "classes" folder, which is the only solution I can come up with that will let me write code to load the file that will work, regardless of its implementation.
The "project" folder I'm talking about is just the NetBeans "project" folder for the servlet, or the "ServetSandBox" folder in my example. I guess that doesn't really matter in the context of the servlet though.
So is using the current thread the appropriate way to do this? When you say that code will work if I put the resource in the WEB-INF directory, that seems to only be true if I try to load it from the servlet itself, not the helper class. The helper class doesn't find the resource in the WEB-INF directory.
Also, I would like to be able to write the default values to a new config file if one doesn't exist. How in the heck do I get a pointer to the "classes" folder, or any other folder that I can also read from using the classloader, so I can write to a new file?