Accessing a local 7.3 database from within a java applet

Error: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: oracle/jdbc/driver/OracleDriver

I can however successfully run this as an application and using the appletviewer so it seems to be a problem with the browser configurations. Is their a "classpath" setting for the browser? Can someone please help?

import java.applet.Applet;
import java.awt.Graphics;
import java.sql.*;
import java.math.*;
import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;

public class Welcome extends Applet {

   // The driver to load
   static final String driver_class = "oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver";

   // The connection to the database
   Connection conn;

   String output_text = "";

   //Initialize the applet
   public void init () {

       try { xInit(); } catch (Exception e) { output_text = e.getMessage(); } finally { if (output_text == "") output_text = "Failure!"; }

}

   //Component initialization
   public void xInit() throws Exception {

     DriverManager.registerDriver (new oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver ());

     Connection conn =
DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:oracle:thin:_at_127.0.0.1:1521:orcl", "griffj01", "griffj01");

     // Query the employee names
     Statement stmt = conn.createStatement ();
     ResultSet rset = stmt.executeQuery ("select 'Welcome to '||value

     while (rset.next ())
        output_text = rset.getString (1);

   public void paint (Graphics g) {