Who's they?
Where and how exactly are you running this?
"they" are my applications. It's all in JBoss.
Re-reading this, this actually doesn't look like the hierarchy you described.
It's more of a delegation model, then actual parent-child hierarchy.
Probably "delegation" is a batter word, because I already has the 2 classloaders references. I want to write a third classloader that would load classes from a classloader and "fail over" to the other classloader.
But why exactly do you need to change classloader before dispatch?
I must admit I don't see a valid reason, but it's true it's been a while since I did web apps ...
Well, the whole history then.. I'm doing a portlet that is a dynamic Portlet Bridge. It can be configured to show any existing web app deployed along with it in the same JBoss. That's for the dispatch.
For that I need to "inject" JBoss Portlet Bridge libs/classes/configs in the application's classpath, so everything loaded by application should look also in the container's classpath. That's for the delegation.
The problem is as described in my first post, I can't do an actually delegation.. Today I got it working by moving some jars to $JBOSS_CONF/lib which obviously isn't a good solution.
I've been talking to Wesley Hales from JBoss Portlet Bridge too, maybe he can give you some insight (I believe you don't mess with portlets a lot ;) )