How to share a library for data access in tomcat 7?

I'm fairly new to the whole web programming stuff and have the following problem:

I have 2 webapps, one a axis web service and another one is a spring application. Both should get a set of data from a library which contains the data in memory. This da开发者_如何学运维ta is large so copying the data for each app is no option.

What I did so far is developing the library which loads and contains the data in a static container. The plan was, that both apps instatiate the class containing the container and may access the data.

Sadly, this doesn't work. I get an exception that the object I want to use are in different classloaders.

My question is: How can I provide such a container provider for both libraries in tomcat 7?

BTW: A database is no option, because its to slow.

Edit: I should have been clear about the data. The data is a Topic Map stored in an topic map engine. (see http://www.isotopicmaps.org ). The engine is used to access the data and therefore is the access point to the data. We have an own engine, which hold the data inmemory which is faster than a database backend.

I Want to have a servlet which provides the configuration and loading of topic maps and then the two servlets above should be able to read and modify a topic map. Thats why I need to have a sort of shared access point to the engine.

This is what distributed caches, key-value stores, document stores, and noSql databases are built for. There are many options and new ones each day. The free and open-source options are likely to meet your needs and provide you with as much support as you will needs. The one the is currently my favorite is membase.

So you want a distributed in-memory cache for a server cluster. You can use among others Terracotta for this. You can find here a nice introduction to Terracotta.

Update: I actually disagree the argument that a database is "too slow". If it's slow, then the datamodel and/or data access code is simply badly designed.