Asking our experts on class loading.

[Meskauskas Audrius]

Hello,

In the OMG specification there are several places where the user 
application passes a class name to the core class library and the method 
inside the core must find and load the user class having this name only.

Class.forName(String) uses classloader that loaded the current class. 
Inside the core it is a system class loader, so there is no use of it 
because the user class is not a part of the core library.

Using thread context class loader seems better, because it is the loader 
that loaded the application. With this loader, typical application finds 
the classes, and it is how our CORBA is currently implemented. The 
problem is, even context class loader may not find a class if part of 
the user application was loaded separately.

This was happening in Mauve tests, where I was observing unexpected 
failures. The default thread context class loader is the loader that was 
used to start the Ant application. Ant loads the Mauve test with its own 
different loader. Then Mauve test classes are not found by the context 
class loader. If the Mauve test calls the core library, the library 
seems having no way to locate the caller class.

To work around the problem, I modified the problematic tests by setting 
temporary the correct class loader as a context class loader for the 
current thread, and now they pass. However if anybody knows the way to 
get the loader of the caller class (stack trace contains the name only - 
no use), it would be great to know it.

Regards
Audrius.

2005-10-13  Audrius Meskauskas  <address@hidden>

       * gnu/testlet/javax/rmi/CORBA/Tie/RMI_IIOP.java,
       gnu/testlet/org/omg/CORBA/ORB/DirectTest.java,
       gnu/testlet/org/omg/CORBA_2_3/ORB/ValueTypeTest.java,
       
gnu/testlet/org/omg/PortableInterceptor/Interceptor/testInterceptors.java:
       Set the thread context class loader to the loader that loaded 
that test.