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):
Download the most recent JAX-WS distribution from https://jax-ws.dev.java.net/ (The exact version I got was JAXWS2.2-20091203.zip)
Place the JAX-WS jars with the dependencies in a separate folder like lib/webservices.
Create a patternset in ant to reference those jars:
Include the patternset in your WAR-related goal. This could look something like:
(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)
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:
javax.jws.
javax.xml.bind.
javax.xml.crypto.
javax.xml.registry.
javax.xml.rpc.
javax.xml.soap.
javax.xml.stream.
javax.xml.ws.
com.sun.xml.api.streaming.*
Remember to place that weblogic-application.xml file in your EAR! The ant goal for that may look similar to:
<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>
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:
true
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:
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.
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)
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!
