Hello All,

I have recently been saddled with the task of making a servlet application designed for Tomcat work in a JBoss portlet. I have successfully created a portlet for the application and it works as long as I don't try to use any of the previous servlet code. My major problem is the NoClassDefFoundError I get when trying to use reflection in the old code. The second part of my problem is the code we are using requires access from the browser to a servlet to process ajax requests. (I haven't even begun to tackle that one).

So the first problem. The portlet is a .war file with a basic structure. It has a WEB-INF/lib folder that I put the prior apps .jar file into. I have one class that creates the portlet. All is happy. The portlet uses this doView method:

protected void doView(RenderRequest request, RenderResponse response) throws PortletException, PortletSecurityException, IOException
 {
 response.setContentType("text/html");
 PrintWriter writer = response.getWriter();
 try{
 PortletRequestDispatcher prd = this.getPortletContext().getRequestDispatcher("/app");
 prd.include(request, response);
 }
 catch(Exception e){
 writer.print("Error Writing Widget:"+e.getStackTrace());
 }
 writer.close();
 }

app is declared in my web.xml and the portlet gets there no problem. The issue is there is a bit of reflection used in a class that the servlet calls. There is where it poops out and I get the NoClassDefFoundError on a class I know exists in the prior app .jar file.

The googling around I have done suggests it probably has something to do with the way JBoss does class loading but I am at a loss to try and figure out what I need to change to get this to work. If anyone out there has run into a similar situation where reflection wont work inside of a portlet .war file please post your comments.

On the second issue, how do I access a servlet URL from a browser in a portlet?

Thanks in advance.