Inheritance problems

Hi everyone,

I am having some problems extending a JSP application and could use some advice.

I have a third-party JSP application (without any documentation, javadoc or otherwise) and am using NetBeans 6.0 to develop it further.

Specifically I am trying to extend a class ("Bottle"). NetBeans' navigator does not show any constructors/fields/methods in this class. When I try to extend Bottle NetBeans has the following complaint about the class declaration:


cannot find symbol
symbol: constructor Bottle()
location com.foo.boo

The class declaration is:


package com.foo.boo

public class BottleExt extends Bottle {
...
}


The only information that NetBeans gives me regarding this class is the declaration:


com.foo.boo
public class Bottle extends Container

In order to inherit properly I created a directory structure of WEB-INF\classes\com\boo\foo\ and placed my class in there.

If I try to code a constructor [just calling super();] I get the same error but the error is on the constructor code instead of the class declaration.

This has my very perplexed. I'm not sure what I am missing and could really use some help.

Thanks!

Someone mentioned to me that it may be the method in which the .jar file was created (the class file is in a .jar) that prevents NetBeans (or any IDE?) from displaying the contents of the class.

Is there any truth to this?

Can anyone describe how to create the .jar so that IDE's can read them?

Thanks!