Friday, March 24, 2017

Oracle Weblogic: Tackling Class Loading Issues for SOA Infra

This blog article discusses how to address class loading issues with the Oracle SOA Infra. It's prime "raison d'etre" being a memory dump of something I don't do often, but may spend significant time in finding out how to do it again.

Some time ago I lost valuable time because some library being deployed twice, once in the wrong place ([SOA_HOME]/lib folder) and once in the right place ([SOA_HOME]/soa/modules/oracle.soa.ext_11.1.1). In this particular case the first was wrong because the library was using classes that were only loaded when the SOA infrastructure was initialized.

I had created a composite that relied upon some code from the jar, which I knew should be there, but every time it was called it gave me a NoSuchMethodError. A nasty problem because deployment of the jar file was not done by me, but instead by some Operations department that I could only contact indirectly, and any request could easily take a day to get resolved. Of course I blamed these stupid people from Operations that did not even know how to deploy a jar file properly, and undoubtedly Operations was blaming this idiot calling himself a developer but did not know how to code straight. Polite as we both are, we did not say so to each other of course. Me giving you this anecdote only to point out one of disadvantages of not doing DevOps ;-)

But then came the WebLogic Classloader Analysis Tool (or CAT for short) to the rescue. With that I was able to determine that my jar was loaded from both the lib folder as well as the oracle.soa_ext_11.1.1 but as the first one has preference over the seconds one, my composite always went to the old lib, even though Operations did deploy the latest version to the proper location, So somewhere early in the process Operations did deploy it in the wrong location (ha!), but then again at the time I probably did not give them proper instructions about its location either (hmm...).

There already is enough information to be found about the Classloader Analysis Tool, including this one, so I just will stick to explaining how I found out to find out what is being loaded from the lib folder of the SOA Server and what from the oracle.soa_ext_11.1.1 folder.

To go to CAT use a URL like this; http://[server]:[port]/wls-cat. Make sure you go to the SOA Server, and not the Admin Server (unless that is one and the same). Any class loaded by the SOA infra you can find from soa-infra -> soa-infra -> View: detailed -> Classloader Tree. The jars from the lib folder are loaded by the java.net.URLClassLoader whereas the SOA infra itself (including the external jars) are loaded by the weblogic.utils.classloaders.GenericClassLoader.




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