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My scenario is the following:
I have a WebApp.war that is deployed to a servlet container. This WebApp.war contains in WEB-INF/lib the following libraries:
I have one other library, say lib_vendor.jar, that I cannot deploy within WebApp/WEB-INF/lib because of licensing issues so I let our customers to copy this library in tomcat/lib after application installation. But since lib_vendor.jar requires lib_a.jar and lib_b.jar that are loaded in the web application class loader, I cannot use lib_vendor.jar.
How can I load an external library (not in WEB-INF/lib) in the same classloader of a web application?
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To use a library, you have to add it to your classpath, which you pass into the javac and java commands using the -cp argument. As long as you do that, you can use classes from a library exactly like you can use a regular Java class or a class that you create- they're all just Java classes.
What are External Libraries? External Libraries are pieces of pre-written code that is easy to implement. You don't really have to know exactly anything about what is inside that code, you just need to know how to use it.
Since you are using Tomcat, you could leverage the VirtualWebappLoader.
Add a META-INF/context.xml whith
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Context path="/somepath/myapp">
<Loader className="org.apache.catalina.loader.VirtualWebappLoader"
virtualClasspath="/somedir/*.jar"/>
</Context>
Remember also that the virtualClasspath attribute must be a absolute path, as correctly stated in the comment below.
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