Tomcat Class Loading

Tomcat loads web module elements in the classpath for servlet execution and debugging in following order:

  1. WEB-INF/classes directory of your web module
  2. WEB-INF/lib/*.jar directory of your web module
  3. Bootstrap classes of your JVM
  4. System class loader classes
  5. $CATALINA_HOME/common/classes
  6. $CATALINA_HOME/common/lib/*.jar
  7. $CATALINA_HOME/classes
  8. $CATALINA_HOME/lib/*.jar

Tomcat 4.0.x does not support .zip files in the WEB-INF/lib directory.

The IDE's Internal Tomcat installation, the $CATALINA_HOME directory corresponds to the tomcat401 directory. Any libraries shared by multiple web modules must be placed in any one of locations 3 through 8 in the above list. Do not add shared libraries to the tomcat401_base directory.

For more information about class loading on Tomcat, see http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-4.0-doc/class-loader-howto.html .

See also
The Tomcat 4.0.x Plugin
Executing Web Modules

Legal Notices