Tomcat 5 seems to allow a developer to use their own classloader. Specifically, the <loader> element can define a different classloader to be used by the application. It replaces the web application class loader.

I created my own version of the WebappClassLoader.java file (Tomcat 5 source) and removed the special references to org.apache.xerces and org.apache.xalan.

Changing the loaderClass attribute of the <loader> element should allow different application-specific xml parsers to be accessed.

I haven;'t been successful yet, because I haven't placed the <application>,xml file under the conf directory -- now I see!

Should work though.

Thanks,
Lawrence Winkler