How should one deal with library clashes in Application Servers?

Question

Third-party libraries are often included by the appliation server you are deploying to and class with the ones included by your application. So far I have dealt with this in the simplest and hackiest way possible: removing the libraries on the app server.

In our case it is ok, noone is relying on the app server to provide them with any libraries. But if I were running my app along with lots of other peoples app, which again might depend on the libraries included by the application server, this would not be a solution.

How is this supposed to be solved (cleanly)? How are you doing it?

An example of a problem might be this: you build an jax-rs application using cxf, hibernate and jackson, and deploy to glassfish 2.1.1. glassfish supplies the asm 3.1 library, but this causes clashes with hibernate using an incompatible 1.5 version. similarly the application needs jackson 1.8.2 (due to a bug fix), but glassfish 2.1.1 ships with version 0.9. BOOM. Any way of fixing this other than simply removing offending libraries?

Answer 1

consider using :

asadmin deploy --libraries ...