Sam Shab

That makes sense. It seems that the "don't put struts jars in a shared lib" advice I remember revolved around that, too. I believe the other possible gotcha is that WEB-INF/lib jars can see those in shared/lib, but not the other way around, which is the only one I could come up with when I posted.

Thanks for the answers -

I a nagging question about how to best make use of Tomcat's shared/lib directory that I can't seem to find a solid answer for:

Is there any chance that putting jars which are used over and over in different contexts and virtual hosts into tomcat/shared/lib will cause interaction problems across contexts? Specifically, I remember reading something a while back about Struts and Jakarta Commons libraries interacting with each other in subtle and unpleasant ways when shared in this way instead of each residing in their respective WEB-INF/lib directory.