JDOM WebSphere and the dreaded classpath

Hi folks, I would like to use JDOM in a plugin I'm writing for a websphere application. We're using WebSphere 6.0.2.7 and the application running on top of it is called xPression. xPression (a print/reporting server) can have user exits (basically a plugin) written in java a class which can be dynamically be loaded and used by the application.

I have written a user exit class that loads up an xml document in JDOM and then uses XPath to return specific bits of data from the xml. This is all works on the local machine in NetBeans with the jdom and necessary jars added to the project library.

When running on the server, I run into the problem where it cannot load the default SAXParser as it doesn't implement XMLParser. It appears that in my WebSphere classpath another (older) SAXParser is present. I have confirmed this by using a bit of code I found on the web which returns the url for a class - in this case, SAXParser is being loaded from the \java\jre\lib\xml.jar somewhere under the websphere home directory and not from the later version I placed on the server. I've added the jdom and its necessary lib jars to the end of websphere class path - I don't want to contaminate the server with newer versions of code as this will probably break xpression.

So... my question is around jars and manifest class path. What I am hoping is that I can add a manifest class path to the jdom jar which will override the websphere class path, therefore loading the correct version of SAXPath and other required jdom libs. This seems to be possible for jar apps but I'm not sure about class libraries in websphere?

Or perhaps someone can suggest another way I can override the WS classpath just for jdom?

In fact, can anyone suggest a way of being able to use XPath on my WS version without using an external java lib at all? Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers

Sam