I found this worrisome statement on this page (http://struts.apache.org/1.3.8/userGuide/configuration.html) regarding sharing jar files across multiple applications:
<i>When a class is loaded from a shared class loader, static variables used within that class become global as well. This can cause inter-webapp conflicts when the underlying code assumes that the statics are global only within a particular web applicaiton (which would be true if the class was loaded from the webapp class loader). There are many cases where the framework, and the Commons libraries it relies on, use static variables to maintain information that is presumed to be visible only within a single web application. <b>Sharing these JAR files can cause unwanted interactions, and probably cause incorrect behavior</b>.</i>
For those of you currently using Struts and Apache Commons (and perhaps other open source libraries) have you run into any issues when sharing the jars amongst multiple applications?
I would like to avoid having multiple applications loading their own copies of these libraries, for obvious reasons. However, if there are issues with doing so, I may have to relax that position.