class loader separation of implementation and API in Tomcat

[Henning Blohm]

Hi everybody,     I had a problem with the tomcat 3.1 release that I hoped would be resolved by newer releases, but it seems that that never happened:       Since tomcat is a framework that integrates Java code it seems natural that tomcat should have a class loader hierarchy that cleanly separates the tomcat implementation classes from the API, so that there is no class collisions between classes used by an application and by tomcat itself. Although tomcat seems to follow that principle when loading servlets, it doesn't apply it to itself. Just yesterday, I downloaded the 3.2.1 release and it seems that you still have to put parser.jar and jaxp.jar from the tomcat's lib folder into the main classpath which effectively prohibites the use of other xml libraries (with the same class names but different implementations) in servlets.         Is this really true? Is there a way to configure tomcat so that you do not have to worry about any classes the tomcat implementation loads?       For a production environment that must be able to accept any web application as long as it complies to the servlet API, this behaviour seems unacceptable to me...       Does anybody know of a solution?   Thank you!   Henning   Ps: Nevertheless, I think tomcat is truly a great open source project!