Therefore, from the perspective of a web application, class or resource loading looks in the following repositories, in this order:
- /WEB-INF/classes of your web application
- /WEB-INF/lib/*.jar of your web application
- Bootstrap classes of your JVM
- System class loader classses (described above)
- $CATALINA_HOME/common/classes
- $CATALINA_HOME/common/endorsed/*.jar
- $CATALINA_HOME/common/lib/*.jar
- $CATALINA_BASE/shared/classes
- $CATALINA_BASE/shared/lib/*.jar
ref from http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-4.1-doc/class-loader-howto.html