[SOLVED] Getting JAX-WS client work on Weblogic 9.2 with ant

I've recently had lots of issues trying to deploy a JAX-WS web servcie client on Weblogic 9.2. It turns out there is no straightforward guide on how to achieve this, so I decided to put together this short wiki entry hoping it might be useful for others.

Firstly, Weblogic 9.2 does not support web servcies using JAX-WS in general. It comes with old versions of XML-related java libraries that are incompatible with the latest JAX-WS (similar issues occur with Axis2, only Axis1 seems to be working flawlessly with Weblogic 9.x but that's a very old and unsupported library).

So, in order to get it working, some hacking is required. This is how I did it (note that we're using ant in our legacy corporate project, you probably should be using maven which should eliminate 50% of those steps below):

1.Download the most recent JAX-WS distribution from https://jax-ws.dev.java.net/ (The exact version I got was JAXWS2.2-20091203.zip)

2.Place the JAX-WS jars with the dependencies in a separate folder like lib/webservices.

3.Create a patternset in ant to reference those jars:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<patternset id="jaxws.classpath">
<include name="webservices/jsr173_api.jar" />  
<include name="webservices/jsr181-api.jar" />       
<include name="webservices/jaxb-api.jar" />
<include name="webservices/jaxb-impl.jar" />
<include name="webservices/jaxb-xjc.jar" /> 
<include name="webservices/jaxws-tools.jar" />
<include name="webservices/jaxws-rt.jar" />       
<include name="webservices/jaxws-api.jar" />
<include name="webservices/policy.jar" />
<include name="webservices/woodstox.jar" />   
<include name="webservices/streambuffer.jar" />       
<include name="webservices/stax-ex.jar" />
<include name="webservices/saaj-api.jar" />
<include name="webservices/saaj-impl.jar" />
<include name="webservices/gmbal-api-only.jar" />   
</patternset>

4.Include the patternset in your WAR-related goal. This could look something like:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<copy todir="${wardir.lib}" includeEmptyDirs="false" flatten="true">
<fileset dir="${libs}">
<!--lots of libs here, related to your project -->
<patternset refid="jaxws.classpath"/>
</fileset>
</copy>

(not the flatten="true" parameter - it's important as Weblogic 9.x is by default not smart enough to access jars located in a different lcoation than WEB-INF/lib inside your WAR file)

5.In case of clashes, Weblogic uses its own jars by default. We want it to use the JAX-WS jars from our application instead. This is achieved by preparing a weblogic-application.xml file and placing it in META-INF folder of the deplotyed EAR file. It should look like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<weblogic-application xmlns="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/90" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<prefer-application-packages>
    <package-name>javax.jws.*</package-name>
    <package-name>javax.xml.bind.*</package-name>
    <package-name>javax.xml.crypto.*</package-name>
    <package-name>javax.xml.registry.*</package-name>
    <package-name>javax.xml.rpc.*</package-name>
    <package-name>javax.xml.soap.*</package-name>
    <package-name>javax.xml.stream.*</package-name>
    <package-name>javax.xml.ws.*</package-name>
    <package-name>com.sun.xml.api.streaming.*</package-name>
</prefer-application-packages>
</weblogic-application>

6.Remember to place that weblogic-application.xml file in your EAR! The ant goal for that may look similar to:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<target name="build-ear" depends="war, manifest">
    <delete dir="${dist}"/>
    <mkdir dir="${dist}"/>    
    <jar destfile="${warfile}" basedir="${wardir}"/>        
    <ear destfile="${earfile}" appxml="resources/${app.name}/application.xml">
        <fileset dir="${dist}" includes="${app.name}.war"/>
        <metainf dir="resources/META-INF"/>     
    </ear>
</target>

7.Also you need to tell weblogic to prefer your WEB-INF classes to those in distribution. You do that by placing the following lines in your WEB-INF/weblogic.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<container-descriptor>
    <prefer-web-inf-classes>true</prefer-web-inf-classes>
</container-descriptor>

8.And that's it for the weblogic-related configuration. Now only set up your JAX-WS goal. The one below is going to simply generate the web service stubs and classes based on a locally deployed WSDL file and place them in a folder in your app:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<target name="generate-jaxws-client">
        <taskdef name="wsimport" classname="com.sun.tools.ws.ant.WsImport"> 
            <classpath path="classpath.main"/>
        </taskdef>          
        <wsimport 
             destdir="${src}"
             package="acme.somewhere.in.your.package.tree.webservices."
             keep="true" 
             wsdl="http://localhost:8088/mockWebService?WSDL">              
        </wsimport>
    </target>

Remember about the keep="true" parameter. Without it, wsimport generates the classes and... deletes them, believe it or not!

For mocking a web service I suggest using SOAPUI, an open source project. Very easy to deploy, crucial for web servcies intergation testing.

9.We're almost there. The final thing is to write a Java class for testing the web service, try to run it as a standalone app first (or as part of your unit tests)

10.And then try to run the same code from withing Weblogic. It should work. It worked for me. After some 3 days of frustration. And yes, I know I should've put 9 and 10 under a single bullet-point, but the title "10 steps to deploy a JAX-WS web service under Web logic 9.2 using ant" sounds just so much better.

Please, edit this post and improve it if you find something missing!