Have two wars in the same Tomcat instance, I want to share some jars. I want these jars take priority over Tomcat shipped jars.
However, because I usually reuse the same Tomcat installation between application (different set of wars), I do not want to modify common.loader folder (the lib folder). Because if I modify the lib folder for application 1, like overriding some Tomcat jar, then it’s lot of work to reset it right. That problem doesn’t exist with EAR, which Tomcat doesn’t support. I’m fine that Tomcat doesn’t support EAR but it could at least provide clean workaround. So I would like to see a new folder called: extraLibs, and the classloader order will become: Bootstrap classes of your JVM System class loader classes (described above) extraLibs Common class loader classes (described above) /WEB-INF/classes of your web application /WEB-INF/lib/*.jar of your web application See http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-7.0-doc/class-loader-howto.html
