Posts Tagged ‘WebLogic Server’

Exception-handling in JAX-WS Web Services on WebLogic

There is more to exception-handling in JAX-WS Web Services than meets the eye. Especially when throwing custom (checked) exceptions from your Java methods that are exposed as Web Service operations. There’s a nice blog by Eben Hewitt on using SOAP Faults and Exceptions in Java JAX-WS Web Services. I recommend reading it; especially when you get the following error: javax.xml.ws.soap.SOAPFaultException java.lang.NoSuchMethodException. This is one of the issues you might run into when migrating from Oracle Application Server (OC4J) to Oracle WebLogic Server.

Migrating EJB 3 applications from OC4J to WebLogic

In a previous post I talked about migrating JAX-WS Web Service projects from JDeveloper 10g/OC4J to JDeveloper 11g/WebLogic. This is one of the activities in a current migration project of a SOA-environment from an OC4J-based stack (OC4J 10g, JDeveloper 10g, SOA Suite 10g, ADF 10g, WebCenter 10g, EJB 3/TopLink Essentials) to a WebLogic-based stack (WebLogic 10g, SOA Suite 10g, ADF 11g, EJB 3/EclipseLink).

As mentioned in the previous post, a lot of migration steps are performed automatically when importing 10g projects in JDeveloper 11g. This is also the case for EJB 3 applications that use TopLink Essentials as persistence provider. All references to this provider are replaced with EclipseLink references since EclipseLink -based on TopLink 11g- is/will be the de facto Oracle persistence provider. Deployment of these EJB 3 components to our development environment -Integrated WebLogic Server in JDeveloper 11g- works fine and everything runs smoothly.

For test, acceptance and production environments we use separate WebLogic 10.3 installations. These are “clean” environments. Instead of having all kinds of frameworks deployed on your application server -as is the case for Oracle Application Server and the Integrated WebLogic Server in JDeveloper 11g- this environment is actually clean, lean and mean.

Although in my opinion this is what you want out-of-the-box -you don’t have all kinds of preinstalled frameworks that you do not use, less classloading issues, and so on- initial deployment of our EJB 3 components failed when deploying: NoClassDefFoundError: org/eclipse/persistence/jpa/PersistenceProvider. That’s because Oracle WebLogic 10.3 is not shipped with TopLink 11g/EclipseLink.

There are several solutions for this. You can use patches 9J3A and 5KXF to install TopLink 11g/EclipseLink on WebLogic 10.3. They can be downloaded using SmartUpdate; I couldn’t find them on MetaLink (yet). You can also install EclipseLink manually on an Oracle WebLogic domain as described in the EclipseLink’s User Guide. Other ways of solving this -although I don’t recommend these options- is to package the persistence provider with every application. That means including EclipseLink archives into an application’s WAR or EAR. Or you can switch to Kodo -BEA’s former JPA implementation- since this is shipped with Oracle WebLogic 10.3. However in the latter case you’re not using the go-forward/strategic persistence provider, which is EcslipseLink. Note that later versions of Oracle WebLogic will probably ship with EclipseLink.