tomcat7: Could not load JDBC driver class [com.mysql.jdbc.Driver]

Question

I\'ve seen several similar questions on stackoverflow, but they didn\'t solved my problem. This one is specially useful, since it points to official tomcat documentation an

Answer 1

Solved!

Arturs Licis' suggestion was the key. Somehow the mysql driver had been incorrectly downloaded. It seemed a .jar file, but failed to load. Tomcat was showing just the first level of the exception:

java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
[...]

But when I coded a very simple helloworld with Class.forName("com.mysql.jdbc.Driver"), the following error was shown instead:

java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
[...]
Caused by: java.util.zip.ZipException: invalid LOC header (bad signature)
[...]

Eureka! Opening the .jar file on WinRar shows that it can be open... but with some errors.

Downloading the driver again did solve the problem.

Downvote for myself :-(