Use this page to examine the class loaders visible to a Web module (.war file) or enterprise bean (.ejb file) in an installed enterprise application. This page helps you to determine which class loaders loaded files of a module and to diagnose problems with class loaders.

To view this administrative console page, click Troubleshooting > Class Loader Viewer > module_name.

The module is currently running on all nodes and servers listed.

To learn more about classes used by the module and their class loaders, click a button:

Button Resulting action
Export Opens a dialog that enables you to view or save the Class Loader information on this page in an XML file.
View Displays the View page, which provides information about class loaders visible to the module in an HTML table format for each class loader. Such information includes:
Delegation
Whether the class loader delegates a load operation to its immediate parent before searching its local classpath for a class or resource
Classpath
The local classpath, which includes the paths over which the class loader searches for classes and resources, excluding the classpaths of any parent class loaders.
Classes
The names of classes loaded by the class loader
Search Displays the Search page, on which we can search class loaders for the following:
  • Specific strings
  • Specific .jar files
  • The names of files in a specific directory
  • The names of files loaded by a specific class loader
Class Loader

Displays a tree hierarchy of class loaders that affect the loading of classes used by the Web or EJB module.

Expand the hierarchy of class loaders to view the following:

  • Class loader names
  • Arrows that point upwards beside class loader names, indicating that requests can go to a parent class loader only and not go to a child class loader
  • The names of classes that are loaded by a class loader
  • The paths of property files and .jar files used by the classes

The following class loaders might be in the hierarchy:

Class loader name Description
JDK Extension Loader The JDK extensions class loader is a composite class loader that is comprised of the Java virtual machine (JVM) bootstrap class loader, the JVM extensions class loader and the JVM system classloader, which load the core SDK classes and resources as well as classes and resources visible on the JVM classpath.
WAS Extension Class Loader The WAS Extension Class Loader loads the WebSphere Application Server classes, standalone resource classes, custom service classes, and custom registry classes. At bootstrap, this class loader uses the ws.ext.dirs system property to determine the path that is used to load classes. Each directory in the ws.ext.dirs class path and every .jar file or .zip file in these directories is added to the class path used by this class loader.
WAS Compound Class Loader The WAS Compound Class Loaders load classes and resources of application (EAR) modules, Web (WAR) modules, and server-associated shared libraries. Under default class loader policies, an instance of a WAS Compound Class Loader exists for each running EAR and WAR module and for each class loader defined in the server configuration.

Click on Classes to view a list of classes loaded by a class loader.