Documentation for J2EE servers

[Gary L Peskin <ga...@firstech.com>]

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