What causes and what are the differences between NoClassDefFoundError and ClassNotFoundException?

Question

What is the difference between NoClassDefFoundError and ClassNotFoundException?

What causes them to be thrown? How can they be resolved?

Answer 1

What is the reason for getting each of them and any thought process on how to deal with such errors?

They're closely related. A ClassNotFoundException is thrown when Java went looking for a particular class by name and could not successfully load it. A NoClassDefFoundError is thrown when Java went looking for a class that was linked into some existing code, but couldn't find it for one reason or another (e.g., wrong classpath, wrong version of Java, wrong version of a library) and is thoroughly fatal as it indicates that something has gone Badly Wrong.

If you've got a C background, a CNFE is like a failure to dlopen()/dlsym() and an NCDFE is a problem with the linker; in the second case, the class files concerned should never have been actually compiled in the configuration you're trying to use them.