anyone know which hibernate jars (dependencies too) can be safely placed in a j2ee server classpath and which must reside in the ear/war (e.g. web-inf/lib)?

any tips appreciated, thanks...!

don't have any authoritative answer but I foud this in a tutorial that **looks** official. Unfortunately I failed to find it online...

Now, copy the libraries to the two classpaths:
1. Copy the JDBC driver for the database to the global classpath. This is required for the DBCP connection
pool software which comes bundled with Tomcat. Hibernate uses JDBC connections to execute SQL on
the database, so you either have to provide pooled JDBC connections or configure Hibernate to use one of
the directly supported pools (C3P0, Proxool). For this tutorial, copy the pg74jdbc3.jar library (for PostgreSQL
7.4 and JDK 1.4) to the global classloaders path. If you'd like to use a different database, simply
copy its appropriate JDBC driver.
2. Never copy anything else into the global classloader path in Tomcat, or you will get problems with various
tools, including Log4j, commons-logging and others. Always use the context classpath for each web application,
that is, copy libraries to WEB-INF/lib and your own classes and configuration/property files to
WEB-INF/classes. Both directories are in the context level classpath by default.

hope it helps..