Glassfish 3.1.2.2 Web Profile and EclipseLink MOXy

2013-05-11

I’ve been evaluating Glassfish to possibly replace Tomcat as our servlet container of choice at work. Because one of the things I love about Tomcat is that it’s so light-weight I read the list of included features in Glassfish Full Profile with a growing sense of dread.

Our .war files only want a basic Servlet environment that provides a database link - they use this to expose RESTful resources and services. Because of this, the Glassfish Web Profile seemed to suit our needs best - all the niceness of multiple domains & a more robust automated deployment without the word “Enterprise” being mentioned too often.

MOXy Trouble#

So I took one of our applications and deployed it in Glassfish. But when our code tried to initialise an EclipseLink MOXy JAXBContext we got:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax/xml/bind/JAXBException  
...  
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:722)  
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: javax.xml.bind.JAXBException not found by org.eclipse.persistence.moxy [156]  
    at org.apache.felix.framework.BundleWiringImpl.findClassOrResourceByDelegation(BundleWiringImpl.java:1460)  
    at org.apache.felix.framework.BundleWiringImpl.access$400(BundleWiringImpl.java:72)  
    at org.apache.felix.framework.BundleWiringImpl$BundleClassLoader.loadClass(BundleWiringImpl.java:1843)  
    at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:356)  
    ... 31 more  

Hmm, not so good! I did some digging and discovered the problem was a combination of factors:

  1. Glassfish Web Profile doesn’t include a JAXB implementation
  2. Because it has no JAXB implementation it falls back on the JAXB implementation in the Java environment
  3. For OSGI purposes, it assumes the version of JAXB provided by the environment is “0.0.0”
  4. EclipseLink MOXy (helpfully included in Glassfish Web Profile) requires version 2.0.0 of javax.bind.xml

So unfortunately the version of JAXB available to MOXy is 0.0.0 but it needs 2.0.0.

The Solution#

The solution to this problem turned out to be pretty simple - simply copy the JAXB implementation included in the Glassfish Full Profile into the lighter Web Profile installation:

cp jaxb-osgi.jar ~/glassfish/glassfish/modules/cp jaxb-api-osgi.jar ~/glassfish/glassfish/modules/endorsed/

I actually had an additional step - the latest MOXy libraries (2.4.1) have a bug that affects our software and currently necessitates we use a snapshot release - so I replaced glassfish/modules/org.eclipse.persistence.* with the 2.4.2-SNAPSHOT jars. Restart the domain and hey presto, no exceptions.