Chapter 12 Loading Classes
Tomcat installs a wide range of class loaders which allow (1) different portions of the container and (2) running web applications on the container to access different repositories of available classes and resources.
A set of class loaders organized into a parent-child relationship is created when you start Tomcat. In this relationship, the parent class loader is directly on top of the child class loader.
Class Loader Definitions
The following lists the class loaders and their corresponding definitions:
- Bootstrap – This class loader includes the basic runtime classes and classes from JAR files.
- System – This class loader is initialized from the contents of the CLASSPATH environment variable.
- Common – This class loader contains additional classes for Tomcat internal classes and web applications.
- WebappX – For each web application deployed in a single Tomcat 6 instance, a class loader is created.