I have some 3rd party jar files that I want to reference in my tomcat web application. I added this line to catalina.properties:

shared.loader=/home/ollie/dev/java/googleapi_samples/gdata/java/lib/*.jar

but I'm still getting this error:

org.apache.jasper.JasperException: javax.servlet.ServletException: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/google/gdata/util/ServiceException
    org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServletWrapper.handleJspException(JspServletWrapper.java:491)
    org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServletWrapper.service(JspServletWrapper.java:401)
    org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet.serviceJspFile(JspServlet.java:313)
    org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet.service(JspServlet.java:260)
    javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:717)

I verified that the com.google.gdata.util.ServiceException is in the gdata-core-1.0.jar file which is in the directory:

/home/ollie/dev/java/googleapi_samples/gdata/java/lib

I did bounce tomcat after I modified catalina.properties.

Update 1: I tried copying the gdata-core-1.0.jar file into /var/lib/tomcat6/webapp/examples/WEB-INF/lib as a test but that didn't fix the problem either.

Update 2: It actually does work when I copy the jar file directly into the WEB-INF/lib directory. There was a permissions issue that I had to resolve. But it's still not working when I use the shared.loader setting. I reconfirmed that the path is correct.