It's all described in Tomcat's ClassLoading HOW-TO. It's not necessarily in alphabetic order. If you observed that behaviour, it should absolutely ...
Class loaders are created for each deployed Context, which load all classes and JAR files contained in each web application's WEB-INF/classes and WEB-INF/lib, ...
Java loads classes in the order they are specified on the classpath. Tomcat does not resolve classpaths in the same way other Java programs ...
This JAR file is not present in the CLASSPATH built by catalina.bat | .sh
Why do you have JAR files that rely on specific ordering to maintain
This is not part of the servlet spec, nor documented in Tomcat: http://stackoverflow .com/questions/5474765/order-of-loading-jar-files-from-lib-directory (answer ...
Java EE does not define a class path order for JAR files found in the WEB-INF/lib directory of an application. Therefore, a proper Java EE ...
Order of loading jar files from lib directory e.g Tomcat · bootstrap/system ( JRE/lib , then server.loader ) · webapp libraries ( WEB-INF/classes , then ...
In Tomcat 7 the absolute-ordering option affects discovery both of SCIs ...
one might expect that launchedurlclassloader will load the class content