I would like to place a request on the xalan-j-users list for someone who can manage a project to document the various J2EE servers and their classloading strategies. The issue of multiple classloaders under Java 2 is very confusing for the average user. However, this architecture is required by, and exploited by, various J2EE servers in various ways.
The impact on XalanJ is that there is a lot of confusion over where to place xalan.jar (and now xml-apis.jar) versus extension classes. Every J2EE server seems to implement this differently and uses its own unique classloading philosophy to determine where these files go. This is fine and I have no problem with each J2EE server making up its own rules. But this seems to account for a high number of questions to the list from J2EE users, which I expect will only increase. To further complicate things, this strategy changes from release to release. I personally cannot keep track of each release of JBoss, WebLogic, Tomcat, WebSphere, ... and I don't think anyone else can either. Perhaps someone knows of such a summary already. If so, it would be great if we could get the URL and add a Xalan-specific explanation of where to put our pieces. Thoughts? Gary
