CLASSPATH now supports wildcards to pick up multiple .jar files. Finally. But given that the AppClassLoader is a derivative of the standard UrlClassLoader, I still don't see why I can't put full URLs on the CLASSPATH and expect them to be resolved correctly....

Oh, and while we're at it, you shouldn't be using CLASSPATH-the-environment variable anymore, anyway. There's far too many ways to manage .jar file resolution to be falling back to that old hack. Prefer instead to put your .jar file dependencies inside the manifest of your application's .jar file, or at the very least, specify the classpath to the java launcher when you kick it off. If you're still doing "set CLASSPATH=..." at the command-line, you're about ten years behind the times.