Well as I think I noted in another post (I think my post on the SecurityManager employed by Notes/Domino) most Apache Jakarta projects will not function properly in Notes/Domino without being placed in the jvm/lib/ext directory due to the way they use introspection, reflection and dynamic classloading. Sad but true.
Examples are log4j and Commons Logging.
I would guess that you get the ClassNotFoundException due to the way classloaders work. A class will always try to load classes it needs using the same classloader that loaded the class in the first place. Depending on the way Digester is written it could be because a custom classloader is installed and because the custom classloader doesn't know of classes imported directly into agents and/or script libraries in Notes.
An issue like that should be resolvable by placing all classes, incl. your TechCandidate class, in jvm/lib/ext.
I think it is worth trying although it is far from an optimal solution.
