What causes and what are the differences between NoClassDefFoundError and ClassNotFoundException?

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What is the difference between NoClassDefFoundError and ClassNotFoundException?

What causes them to be thrown? How can they be resolved?

I often encounter these throwables when modifying existing code to include new jar files. I have hit them on both the client side and the server side for a java app distributed through webstart.

Possible reasons I have come across:

  1. packages not included in build.xml for the client side of code
  2. runtime classpath missing for the new jars we are using
  3. version conflicts with previous jar

When I encounter these today I take a trail-and-error approach to get things working. I need more clarity and understanding.

classnotfoundexception noclassdeffounderror classpath java
15 Answers

A ClassNotFoundException is thrown when the reported class is not found by the ClassLoader. This typically means that the class is missing from the CLASSPATH. It could also mean that the class in question is trying to be loaded from another class which was loaded in a parent classloader and hence the class from the child classloader is not visible. This is sometimes the case when working in more complex environments like an App Server (WebSphere is infamous for such classloader issues).

People often tend to confuse java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError with java.lang.ClassNotFoundException however there's an important distinction. For example an exception (an error really since java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError is a subclass of java.lang.Error) like

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:
org/apache/activemq/ActiveMQConnectionFactory

does not mean that the ActiveMQConnectionFactory class is not in the CLASSPATH. Infact its quite the opposite. It means that the class ActiveMQConnectionFactory was found by the ClassLoader however when trying to load the class, it ran into an error reading the class definition. This typically happens when the class in question has static blocks or members which use a Class that's not found by the ClassLoader. So to find the culprit, view the source of the class in question (ActiveMQConnectionFactory in this case) and look for code using static blocks or static members. If you don't have access the the source, then simply decompile it using JAD.

On examining the code, say you find a line of code like below, make sure that the class SomeClass in in your CLASSPATH.

private static SomeClass foo = new SomeClass();

Tip : To find out which jar a class belongs to, you can use the web site jarFinder . This allows you to specify a class name using wildcards and it searches for the class in its database of jars. jarhoo allows you to do the same thing but its no longer free to use.

If you would like to locate the which jar a class belongs to in a local path, you can use a utility like jarscan ( http://www.inetfeedback.com/jarscan/ ). You just specify the class you'd like to locate and the root directory path where you'd like it to start searching for the class in jars and zip files.

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