Downloading Jar files in a specific order on Tomcat 6

I am working on a web application where I have dependencies on two different jars containing two different versions of the same class. The jar files are supplied by an external provider and cannot be modified.

I created a custom classloader that first tries to load classes from a specific set of jars first, and if that fails, it just loads the class in the standard way. This ensures that a specific set of jar files are always used first. This solves my problem.

However, I was wondering if there is an easier way.