Right now, it won't make much difference as GWT gets user classes from the same classpath that GWT classes are loaded from. However, that leads to conflict for shared code where you want to use a different version of something than the version GWT itself needs to run. So, in the future we may provide a way to give separate classpaths.
I think of the following guidelines for choosing which classloader to use: - if a class being loaded is bundled with some other class (ie, known to be from the same jar), use that class's classloader to load it. - if you want to load a system class and definitely don't want it to be overridden, use the system classloader - otherwise, use the thread context classloader. Since you have already submitted it and this will generally be used only in tests, this is just FYI and you don't need to update it. http://gwt-code-reviews.appspot.com/1604804/ -- http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors