I have an application I’m trying to modernize and migrate to Liberty and I’m having an issue with the initialization of the application which I’m pretty sure is the result of different classloader options between Websphere 9 and WebSphere Liberty. The EAR file consists of 4 WAR files and a lib folder with other utility jars and 3rd party libraries. It uses the Spring Framework WebApplicationInitializer to initialize the servlets instead of the legacy web.xml approach. From what I can tell, in WebSphere 9 we had an option to associate a shared library with the server or with just an application, with Liberty it seems only possible with the application itself. My application never seems to be initializing the WebApplicationInitializer, which now resides in the EARs lib directory. I’m positive the issue has something to do with classloading since if I temporarily revert the logic back to using a traditional web.xml the application begins to boot (though unsuccessfully for other reasons). Is there any further configuration of the classloader I can do here to more accurately emulate Websphere 9? The same EAR file deploys just fine on TomEE and WebLogic.