SRV.4.6 Reloading Considerations

Many servlet containers support servlet reloading for ease of development. Reloading of servlet classes has been accomplished by previous generations of servlet containers by creating a new class loader to load the servlet which is distinct from class loaders used to load other servlets or the classes that they use in the servlet context. This can have the undesirable side effect of causing object references within a servlet context to point at a different class or object than expected, which can cause unexpected behavior.

Therefore, when a container provider implements a class reloading scheme for ease of development, they must ensure that all servlets, and classes that they may use, are loaded in the scope of a single class loader guaranteeing that the application will behave as expected by the developer.