I was able to implement this for Tomcat (Tested on Tomcat 7.0.52). My solution involves implementing custom version of WebAppLoader which extends standard Tomcat's WebAppLoader. Thanks to this solution you can pass custom classloader to load classes for each of web application.
To utilize this new loader you need to declare it for each application (either in Context.xml file placed in each war or in Tomcat's server.xml file). This loader takes an extra custom parameter webappName which is later passed to LibrariesStorage class to determine which libraries should be used by which application.
<Context path="/pl-app" >
<Loader className="web.DynamicWebappLoader" webappName="pl-app"/>
</Context>
<Context path="/my-webapp" >
<Loader className="web.DynamicWebappLoader" webappName="myApplication2"/>
</Context>
Once this is defined you need to install this DynamicWebappLoader to Tomcat. To do this copy all copiled classes to lib directory of Tomcat (so you should have following files [tomcat dir]/lib/web/DynamicWebappLoader.class, [tomcat dir]/lib/web/LibrariesStorage.class, [tomcat dir]/lib/web/LibraryAndVersion.class, [tomcat dir]/lib/web/WebAppAwareClassLoader.class).
You need also to download xbean-classloader-4.0.jar and place it in Tomcat's lib dir (so you should have [tomcat dir]/lib/xbean-classloader-4.0.jar. NOTE:xbean-classloader provides special implementation of classloader (org.apache.xbean.classloader.JarFileClassLoader) which allowes to load needed jars at runtime.
Main trick is made in LibraryStorgeClass (full implementation is at the end). It stores a mapping between each application (defined by webappName) and libraries which this application is allowed to load. In current implementation this is hardcoded, but this can be rewritten to dynamically generate list of libs needed by each application. Each library has its own instance of JarFileClassLoader which ensures that each library is only loaded one time (the mapping between library and its classloader is stored in static field "libraryToClassLoader", so this mapping is the same for every web application because of static nature of the field)
class LibrariesStorage {
private static final String JARS_DIR = "D:/temp/idea_temp_proj2_/some_jars";
private static Map<LibraryAndVersion, JarFileClassLoader> libraryToClassLoader = new HashMap<>();
private static Map<String, List<LibraryAndVersion>> webappLibraries = new HashMap<>();
static {
try {
addLibrary("commons-lang3", "3.3.2", "commons-lang3-3.3.2.jar"); // instead of this lines add some intelligent directory scanner which will detect all jars and their versions in JAR_DIR
addLibrary("commons-lang3", "3.3.1", "commons-lang3-3.3.1.jar");
addLibrary("commons-lang3", "3.3.0", "commons-lang3-3.3.0.jar");
mapApplicationToLibrary("pl-app", "commons-lang3", "3.3.2"); // instead of manually mapping application to library version, some more intelligent code should be here (for example you can scann Web-Inf/lib of each application and detect needed jars
mapApplicationToLibrary("myApplication2", "commons-lang3", "3.3.0");
(...)
}
In above example, suppose that in directory with all the jars (defined here by JARS_DIR) we have only a commons-lang3-3.3.2.jar file. This would mean that application identified by "pl-app" name (the name comes from webappName attribute in tag in Context.xml as mentioned above) will be able to load classes from commons-lang jar. Application identified by "myApplication2" will get ClassNotFoundException at this point because it has access only to commons-lang3-3.3.0.jar, but this file is not present in JARS_DIR directory.
Full implementation here:
package web;
import org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappLoader;
import org.apache.xbean.classloader.JarFileClassLoader;
import java.io.File;
import java.net.MalformedURLException;
import java.net.URL;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.List;
import java.util.Map;
public class DynamicWebappLoader extends WebappLoader {
private String webappName;
private WebAppAwareClassLoader webAppAwareClassLoader;
public static final ThreadLocal lastCreatedClassLoader = new ThreadLocal();
public DynamicWebappLoader() {
super(new WebAppAwareClassLoader(Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader()));
webAppAwareClassLoader = (WebAppAwareClassLoader) lastCreatedClassLoader.get(); // unfortunately I did not find better solution to access new instance of WebAppAwareClassLoader created in previous line so I passed it via thread local
lastCreatedClassLoader.remove();
}
// (this method is called by Tomcat because of Loader attribute in Context.xml - <Context> <Loader className="..." webappName="myApplication2"/> )
public void setWebappName(String name) {
System.out.println("Setting webapp name: " + name);
this.webappName = name;
webAppAwareClassLoader.setWebAppName(name); // pass web app name to ClassLoader
}
}
class WebAppAwareClassLoader extends ClassLoader {
private String webAppName;
public WebAppAwareClassLoader(ClassLoader parent) {
super(parent);
DynamicWebappLoader.lastCreatedClassLoader.set(this); // store newly created instance in ThreadLocal .. did not find better way to access the reference later in code
}
@Override
public Class<?> loadClass(String className) throws ClassNotFoundException {
System.out.println("Load class: " + className + " for webapp: " + webAppName);
try {
return LibrariesStorage.loadClassForWebapp(webAppName, className);
} catch (ClassNotFoundException e) {
System.out.println("JarFileClassLoader did not find class: " + className + " " + e.getMessage());
return super.loadClass(className);
}
}
public void setWebAppName(String webAppName) {
this.webAppName = webAppName;
}
}
class LibrariesStorage {
private static final String JARS_DIR = "D:/temp/idea_temp_proj2_/some_jars";
private static Map<LibraryAndVersion, JarFileClassLoader> libraryToClassLoader = new HashMap<>();
private static Map<String, List<LibraryAndVersion>> webappLibraries = new HashMap<>();
static {
try {
addLibrary("commons-lang3", "3.3.2", "commons-lang3-3.3.2.jar"); // instead of this lines add some intelligent directory scanner which will detect all jars and their versions in JAR_DIR
addLibrary("commons-lang3", "3.3.1", "commons-lang3-3.3.1.jar");
addLibrary("commons-lang3", "3.3.0", "commons-lang3-3.3.0.jar");
mapApplicationToLibrary("pl-app", "commons-lang3", "3.3.2"); // instead of manually mapping application to library version, some more intelligent code should be here (for example you can scann Web-Inf/lib of each application and detect needed jars
mapApplicationToLibrary("myApplication2", "commons-lang3", "3.3.0");
} catch (MalformedURLException e) {
throw new RuntimeException(e.getMessage(), e);
}
}
private static void mapApplicationToLibrary(String applicationName, String libraryName, String libraryVersion) {
LibraryAndVersion libraryAndVersion = new LibraryAndVersion(libraryName, libraryVersion);
if (!webappLibraries.containsKey(applicationName)) {
webappLibraries.put(applicationName, new ArrayList<LibraryAndVersion>());
}
webappLibraries.get(applicationName).add(libraryAndVersion);
}
private static void addLibrary(String libraryName, String libraryVersion, String filename)
throws MalformedURLException {
LibraryAndVersion libraryAndVersion = new LibraryAndVersion(libraryName, libraryVersion);
URL libraryLocation = new File(JARS_DIR + File.separator + filename).toURI().toURL();
libraryToClassLoader.put(libraryAndVersion,
new JarFileClassLoader("JarFileClassLoader for lib: " + libraryAndVersion,
new URL[] { libraryLocation }));
}
private LibrariesStorage() {
}
public static Class<?> loadClassForWebapp(String webappName, String className) throws ClassNotFoundException {
System.out.println("Loading class: " + className + " for web application: " + webappName);
List<LibraryAndVersion> webappLibraries = LibrariesStorage.webappLibraries.get(webappName);
for (LibraryAndVersion libraryAndVersion : webappLibraries) {
JarFileClassLoader libraryClassLoader = libraryToClassLoader.get(libraryAndVersion);
try {
return libraryClassLoader.loadClass(className); // ok current lib contained class to load
} catch (ClassNotFoundException e) {
// ok.. continue in loop... try to load the class from classloader connected to next library
}
}
throw new ClassNotFoundException("Class " + className + " was not found in any jar connected to webapp: " +
webappLibraries);
}
}
class LibraryAndVersion {
private final String name;
private final String version;
LibraryAndVersion(String name, String version) {
this.name = name;
this.version = version;
}
@Override
public boolean equals(Object o) {
if (this == o) {
return true;
}
if ((o == null) || (getClass() != o.getClass())) {
return false;
}
LibraryAndVersion that = (LibraryAndVersion) o;
if ((name != null) ? (!name.equals(that.name)) : (that.name != null)) {
return false;
}
if ((version != null) ? (!version.equals(that.version)) : (that.version != null)) {
return false;
}
return true;
}
@Override
public int hashCode() {
int result = (name != null) ? name.hashCode() : 0;
result = (31 * result) + ((version != null) ? version.hashCode() : 0);
return result;
}
@Override
public String toString() {
return "LibraryAndVersion{" +
"name='" + name + '\'' +
", version='" + version + '\'' +
'}';
}
}
