Loading derby.war (derby servlet server) before other web applications in Tomcat

[adam_gent]

I'm trying to figure out how to use derby.war in the same Servlet Container as other web applications that depend on it.
I asked the question fist on Stackoverflow (I didn't realize you had an active mailing list... apologies).
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6818643/loading-derby-war-derby-servlet-server-before-other-web-applications-in-tomcat

I need the derby war to load first otherwise our database connection pool will try to immediately connect to the derby environment and fail.
We have tried to set Spring and our db pool (bonecp) to lazy initialize but that doesn't seem to work correctly.

Have others had this issue? We were hoping to have a single tomcat instance with everything you needed to easy installation of our product.

-Adam