Weblogic classloading

java.lang.NoSuchMethodError sucks

Getting a java.lang.NoSuchMethodError is usually the beginning of great exploration of your platform – in this case weblogic. Javadoc says:

Thrown if an application tries to call a specified method of a class (either static or instance), and that class no longer has a definition of that method.
Normally, this error is caught by the compiler; this error can only occur at run time if the definition of a class has incompatibly changed.

java Classloader might be the culprit

What’s the hack going on here! Libraries used are embedded into the final archive I did verified that! If you don’t know simply suspect classloaders, publicly known enemies of java developers 🙂 As rule no.1 which says: “Verify your assumptions”. The fact that the class is in archive doesn’t necessary mean that it gets loaded, so to verify that simply pass -verbose or -verbose:class argument to weblogic’s JVM in startUp.sh/bin and you will get the origin of loaded classes.

Class loaded from WL_HOME/modules, how’s that possible? To understand that general understanding of classloading is essential and then understand your J2EE standard implementation e.g. Weblogic, JBoss, … This post is not going to pretend an expert detail knowledge level on this topic so I will rather stay with general principles with reference to details documentation.

J2EE Application server class loaders hierarchy

Java has several class loaders (bootstrap, extension, …) the important fact is that they work in some hierarchy (parent-child relationship) with some delegation scheme which says when to load a class and from where. Java elementary delegation principle says: Delegate finding classes and resources to their parent before searching own classpath. Only if the parent cannot find it child is allowed to load it. So far so good. To complicate the matter a bit more – java servlet specification recommends look at child classloader before delegating to parent (if this recommendation were taken you need to check with documentation of J2EE implementation you are using, as you can see you know nothing based on those rules 🙂 ) So in my case of Weblogic J2EE implementation

as you can see system classloader is the parent of all the application’s classloaders, details can be found here. So how the class get loaded from WL_HOME/modules ? The framework library must be on system classpath. On the system classpath is just weblogic.jar not my framework library?

Weblogic class loader magic

Weblogic 10 in order to better modularity included components under WL_HOME/modules and weblogic.jar now refers to these components in the modules directory from its manifest classpath. So that means that other version of library sits on system classloader – the parent of all the application classloaders, so that means that those libraries included in application archives will be ignores based on the delegation scheme. (That was probably the idea why was recommended in J2EE classloading delegation scheme – child first). However weblogic does offer other way how to solve this case by so called classloader filters/interceptors defined in weblogic specific deployment descriptor either on ear level or war level.

weblogic-application.xml

org.apache.log4j.*
antlr.*


weblogic.xml

      true