As stated in #17347 in certain situations the current custom provider lookup will fail. I believe there is no way of having a cross app server jar based resource loader, correct me if I am wrong. I have seen completely different behaviors for exploded or archive based WAR or EAR deployments, even on the same application server. Worst case some classes will be loaded using the system classloader. In these cases you will never be able to access to the WEB archive classpath, unless you use servletContext.getResource ...
One possible way to handle this may be adding a new <provider name="" type="" /> tag to server-config.wsdd and call registerProvider(QName uri, WSDDProvider prov) directly while reading the configuration. If this is OK I will propose a patch ASAP. Jens PS: There are a few other areas in AXIS which require exploded deployment. In my opinion a pretty nasty requirement ;(.
