Class Loader Question. Tomcat classloader and Xalan extensions

["Roytman, Alex" <ro...@peacetech.com>]

Hello,

I am having problems using Xalan extensions in Tomcat environment.
Xalan can not load extension classes which are not on system class path

- I have Xalan.jar on my system classpath because I want it to be shared by
all contexts
- I have my application jar in WEB-INF/lib directory so it is loaded by
context's own classloader
- My application uses Xalan.jar to do some XSL transformations. 
- Xalan tries to load extension classes which reside in my application jar
(loaded by context classloader) and can't find them

two obvious but not acceptable solutions would be 
 - put xalan.jar in every context (web application) together with my
application jar - very inefficient
 - extract extension classes and all classes they depend on and put them on
system classpath - almost impossible and very dangerous

Can anybody offer better solution for this problem?

Thank you very much in advance