Classloader access issue

["Zabel, Ian" <IZ...@cirqit.com>]

Listers,

Is there a way to access Tomcat4's classloaders for the common/lib,
webapps/{webapp}/WEB-INF/lib, shared/lib?

We deploy with a war file, which is extracted into the webapps directory,
but we rely on another third party jar that we keep in shared/lib which now
needs to be able to access the classes for our webapp in the jars in
WEB-INF/lib dir. Is this possible?

We are able to workaround the problem by putting our extracted jars from the
war into shared/lib along with the third party jar, but this is far from
desirable, as it would no longer be a true "Webapp" deployment.

If we can somehow access the classloader for the webapp, we could pass it to
this third party jar, but I doubt it is possible...

Any suggestions?

Ian.