I have a spring application that uses JBoss Drools 5. It works fine except for when I attempt to redeploy (i.e. hot deploy) the application after I make a change during development. It appears that tomcat keeps a lock on 2 drools jar files, drools-compiler-5.0.1.jar and drools-core-5.0.1.jar. Since they can't be deleted the new war file does not get deployed. If my application does not make any Drools logic calls, then the hot deploy works. Does anyone have any ideas?