I was able to get the Phoenix JDBC driver working but I had to include 42 individual dependency jars in the ignition.conf file. The gateway would not start if I tried including the directory wrapper.java.classpath.3=lib/phoenix.
Also, loading dependencies via the web app did not work because it would not accept the .xml files. Placing XML files in the in user-lib folder also did not seem work either.
I am glad its working but I feel like there should be a better way. Using the ignition.conf I saw the start time increase with each jar file I added.
Thanks for all your help and let me know if you have any other ideas to try