Java SE (Java Platform, Standard Edition)

Hi Folks,

My application communicates with DB's which typically are either cp850 or cp437 and the JDBC driver relies on the conversion stuff in the sun.io package that is in the charsets.jar file. Now as long as charsets.jar is in the jre/lib directory, life is good.

But, many of my clients don't have charsets.jar even though they're running recent JRE versions (1.4 and above)--basically, they got the JRE through another 3rd party custom install and it didn't include charsets.jar.

So, I thought, no biggy, I'll just set up my application's JNLP file to send along a properly signed copy of charsets.jar. Well, the JRE (or at least the JDBC driver) can't find the classes in the JAR file when they're delivered by JWS. The JDBC driver complains that it can't convert the DB codepage data to Unicode. If I then copy the charsets.jar file to the jre/lib directory, it immediately works.

Is there something special about charsets.jar (or is the class loading in the JDBC driver probably just screwed up)?

Thanks for any insights,

John