Therefore, from the perspective of a web application, class or resource loading looks in the following repositories, in this order:
Bootstrap classes of your JVM
System class loader classes (described above)
/WEB-INF/classes of your web application
/WEB-INF/lib/*.jar of your web application
Common class loader classes (described above)
Classes which are part of the JRE base classes cannot be overridden. For some classes (such as the XML parser components in J2SE 1.4+), the J2SE 1.4 endorsed feature can be used. Last, any JAR file that contains Servlet API classes will be explicitly ignored by the classloader — Do not include such JARs in your web application.