Webapp classloader question.

["Lee, William" <Wi...@Cognos.COM>]

Hi all,

When moving from tomcat 4.0.x to 4.1.x, we discovered that the
WebappClassLoader.java had been changed such that all classes from
"org.apache.xerces" and "org.apache.xalan" are forced to be loaded using the
delegate model first, before looking into the webapp directory. This seems
to related to the JDK 1.4 support of the xml and xslt parser.

However, after a long conversation with the Sun's Java engineer, he point
out that, even JDK 1.4 shipped with the default xml and xslt parser,
application server and servlet container should continue to use the one
provided from the webapp directory as described in the servlet spec. 2.3.

Could someone please hint some lights on why tomcat 4.1.x decided to enforce
the delegate model for these two pacakges?

(The reason I'm asking is that, we try to use the latest Xerces in our
webapps, and since it always look and found the one from common/endorsed
directory, our latest version will always be skipped.)

Thanks in advance for your help.
William.

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