How do I make Weblogic 10 prefer the jars in myApp.war:/WEB-INF/lib/ without throwing VerifyErrors?

Question

The Weblogic classloader seems to prefer system libraries over the libraries in my war's WEB-INF/lib/.

I've tried setting the following in WEB-INF/weblogic.xml, without success:

<weblogic-web-app>
    <container-descriptor>
        <prefer-web-inf-classes>true</prefer-web-inf-classes>
    </container-descriptor>
</weblogic-web-app>

This just gives me a lot of VerifyErrors:

exception is java.lang.VerifyError: (class: org/apache/xerces/parsers/AbstractSAXParser, method: parse signature: (Lorg/xml/sax/InputSource;)V) Incompatible object argument for function call
        at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.ConstructorResolver.createArgumentArray(ConstructorResolver.java:730)
        at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.ConstructorResolver.autowireConstructor(ConstructorResolver.java:196)
        at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.autowireConstructor(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:1003)
        at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.createBeanInstance(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:907)
        at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.doCreateBean(AbstractAutowireCapableBeanFactory.java:485)
        Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace

(I'm trying to avoid packaging the WAR into an EAR.)

Copal

What system libraries are these? – Emera

prefer-web-inf-classes should work, I assume you've cleared out all temp folders and cached copies of the war within the domain? – Unfruitful

Is this to do with the JAXP libraries that Weblogic helpfully includes in your war's classpath? – Rayerayfield

There is a new option in WebLogic to use the perfer-application-packages in WAR files. What version are you using? – Nauseous

@Jeff West: We use 11g. Which option is that? – Copal

@artbristol: It looks like Weblogic have already loaded Sax components into the classpath, which crashes with differently versioned Sax in the War. – Copal

WebLogic enables you to do bottoms-up classloading which loads from the WAR/EAR first, getting around the clashes. – Nauseous

11g has multiple releases. Are you using 10.3.3 or 10.3.4, perhaps? – Nauseous

If you want to continue the conversation, email me at [email protected]. Easier than message board for iterative work. We can post the result here. – Nauseous

Answer 1

I was never able to fix this satisfactorily, other than by specifying -Djavax.xml.parsers.SAXParserFactory=[xerces sax parser factory class name] (and so on for the other JAXP factories like validation SchemaFactory) when starting Weblogic.

None of the filtering / prefer-web-inf stuff worked, possibly due to Weblogic requiring JAXP libraries on startup before it even reads any of the WAR / EAR config files.

Rayerayfield

Answer 2

I had this problem too with tomcat-arquillian. Turns out "xml-apis 2.0.2" was in my classpath, which is actually xml-apis 1.0.b2 and which is too old to be compatible with xercesImpl 2.9.1 which requires xml-apis 1.3.04.

Ezechiel