Dealing with “Xerces hell” in Java/Maven?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

_x000D_ I guess there is one question you need to answer: Does there exist a xerces*.jar that everything in your application can live with? If not you are basically screwed and would have to use something like OSGI, which allows you to have different versions of a library loaded at the same time. Be warned that it basically replaces jar version issues with classloader issues ... If there exists such a version you could make your repository return that version for all kinds of dependencies. It's an ugly hack and would end up with the same xerces implementation in your classpath multiple times but better than having multiple different versions of xerces. You could exclude every dependency to xerces and add one to the version you want to use. I wonder if you can write some kind of version resolution strategy as a plugin for maven. This would probably the nicest solution but if at all feasible needs some research and coding. For the version contained in your runtime environment, you'll have to make sure it either gets removed from the application classpath or the application jars get considered first for classloading before the lib folder of the server get considered. So to wrap it up: It's a mess and that won't change.