I have encountered a problem trying to use the Jaybird RC2 driver with
Firebird 1.0.2 when debugging an application using the Eclipse IDE version
2.1 M3 and the Sun JVM 1.4.1_01, all running on Windows XP with service pack
1.

What happened is that when I executed the following Java statement
Class.forName("org.firebirdsql.jdbc.FBDriver");

I got a NoClassDefFoundError thrown. After verifying that the
firebirdsql.jar file was on the classpath my first suspicion was that there
might be a class file incompatibility if the binary version of the driver
had been compiled under another Java compiler. I then downloaded the source
for the driver from CVS and rebuilt the driver using the Sun 1.4.1_01
compiler.

Using the jars produced from this build corrected the problem. However, this
is really just a stopgap. We are looking at using Firebird as our primary
open source database, but we need binaries that will runon the common JVM's
including Sun 1.3 and 1.4 and IBM 1.3. Do you think that this will be
possible in the short term? We are hoping to have an alpha release of our
project before the end of January.

Regards

Jonathan Gossage