Is it possible to share the hibernate.jar across multiple webapps? I have tried putting the jar under shared/lib and hibernate cannot see the config resources. Any ideas anyone?

env: hibernate 2.1.2, tomcat 4.1.24

Just don't do it. If you mess about with the global classpath in Tomcat, you will soon have some serious and difficult to find problems. This even works without Tomcat: Just try to get commons-logging working.

...even without Hibernate. Tomcat is essential.

I realize it and completely agree with you! This is something I only want to do in my dev env. I have a handful of projects that I am working on all of which use the same technologies and I have managed to put all the jars in shared/lib and get it to work except Hibernate. commons-logging was really a pain to tackle, but placing the logging jars under the topmost classloader (common/lib) seems to be working. The only problem is you now have a single logging properties file for all the projects!

But I guess I will agree with you that it is probably not worth it. Trying to find out alternatives, I guess. Anyway, thanks!