[opencms-dev] How to solve Opencms / Tomcat Xerces version problem ?

[Peter Woods]

I'm bulding a site using OpenCms 5.0.1 and Tomcat 4.1.3
As others have pointed out, these rely on different versions of Xerces (versions 1 and 2, respectively).
For development, I'm running Tomcat with Xerces version 1 and everything's ok.

There is a problem, though. In the live environment, I do not have control over Tomcat, as it's a shared server, with other web apps
which may break if Xerces is "downgraded" from version 2 to 1.

What can I do ?
I know that OpenCms 6 will fix the problem but it currently "pre-alpha", so I don't want to risk using it for a live site.
I could modify the source of OpenCms 5 to use Xerces 2. I've not done it yet but I believe I'd only need to change
CmsXmlXerxecParser.java.
That's not a solution I'm particularly happy with either (I always prefer to use the official releases where possible).

I've done some research and it ought to be possible to persuade Tomcat and OpenCms to use their own versions of Xerces.
According to the Tomcat docs, individual web apps can override the version of Xerces being used by putting in /WEB-INF/lib.
Either I've missed something obvious, or that doesn't work.
Note that Java 1.4 (which we're using) introduced the concept of "Endorsed Standards", which might be having an effect here.

Any ideas, folks ?