[news.eclipse.platform] Re: Eclipse ignoring JAVA_HOME?

[John Arthorne <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

By default, Eclipse doesn't use the extension class loader that normally 
finds JARs in that directory.  Your options include:

 1) Put the JARs in your plugin
 2) Put the JARs on the boot class path (-Xbootclasspath/a:<dir>)
 3) Change Eclipse to use the extension class loader

For 3), set the "osgi.parentClassloader" environment variable to "ext":

eclipse -vmargs -Dosgi.parentClassloader="ext"

2) and 3) are generally not recommended, since they effectively add JARs 
to the namespace for every single plugin in the platform.  If some 
plugin wants to reference a different class with the same name as a 
class in one of those extra JARs, it won't be able to.

For more information:

https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=30919
--


Tshwala wrote:
> Hi all
>
> From what I understand adding external jars into $JAVA_HOME/lib/ext should
> make it unnecessary to add a classpath setting. I have done this for mysql
> connectorj and swt and both times I had to add the jars manually to the
> project preferences to make it work. Even after adding mysql-connectorj
> manually I get the following error
>
> java.lang.ClassNotFoundException:
> com/mysql/jdbc/Driver 
>
> The same program run outside of eclipse runs without any problems
> without adding any classpaths.
>
> Any ideas what could be the problem?