I've been looking all over for a solution to this and haven't gotten far yet. I am building an e-commerce site using Servlets. The hosting company that we are using has MySQL however they have never connected to it through Servlets. I can connect to the database through a standard Java app on my machine using the mm.mysql driver that is in my CLASSPATH. I have asked repeatedly for my hosting company to load up a Java - MySQL driver that my servlet can access but they haven't done it yet. In fact they have "assigned it a task to better serve me" which I believe is their way of say that they have never done this before and are trying to figure out how.

Can anyone let me know of a way to load the class from inside my servlet for the time being? I have looked for an understandable classLoader subclass, such as NetworkClassLoader, but I haven't found any that work for my system or they are so complicated that I'm not even sure that it's connecting to my machine right.

Thanks, Matt