For some applications I use ZK, others Hibernate, other Apache Commons, etc.
I don't want to deploy a 75MB war file, just because it uses lots of libraries.
I don't want to add the libraries to my tomcat lib folder, or nor the classpath to it's configuration as I may have an old application using library x.1 and another application using library x.2
For this reason, it would be great to have something in the web.xml or context.xml where I say something like:
<classpath>/usr/local/tomcat/custom-libs/zk-5.0.4</classpath>
Note: The above is pseudo-code