good point. What about environments that embed Tomcat without following
Tomcat's directory layout, and in which the classloader hierachy/depth is different from that in Tomcat?
I don't give them that option (with regards to this) in LiteWebServer. The only place I look for shared libraries is $CATALINA_HOME/shared/lib. Is that really a severe limitation, you think?
I think it depends on whether you anticipate (or support) LiteWebServer being bundled (as one or more libraries) into other products that use a different directory layout, with different locations for shared libs. If that's the case, limiting the location of shared libs to $CATALINA_HOME/shared/lib might be too restrictive.
That's why Tomcat searches the webapp's classloader delegation chain for JARs, which ensures that it will find shared libs regardless of their location. Of course, by searching the classloader chain all the way up, we end up parsing too many JARs. I think it's impossible to know ahead of time where to stop in the chain, until you've actually traversed the entire chain. For example, an approach that walks the chain just two levels up won't work in environments where the classloaders 3 or 4 levels up in the chain are also responsible for loading shared libs.
Jan
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