jaxws 2.1.5 on weblogic 10.3.1 instead of pre-installed jaxws 2.1.1?

Question

Is it possible, and when yes, how?

Answer 1

Actually, the JAX-WS implementation bundled in WebLogic 10.3 is based on JAX-WS RI 2.1.4 as documented in the What's New in WebLogic Server:

The WebLogic Server implementation of JAX-WS is based on the JAX-WS Reference Implementation (RI), Version 2.1.4, and includes enhancements to the tool layer to simplify the building and deployment of JAX-WS services and to ease the migration from JAX-RPC to JAX-WS. The following features and enhancements are available from the JAX-WS RI 2.1.4.

But this is just a side note :) Now, to answer your question, yes, it is possible. Basically, the idea is to package everything as an EAR and to provide a weblogic-application.xml to specify the Java packages that need to loaded from the EAR instead of from WebLogic's default classloader. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Create an EAR with your war embedded in it

2. In the META-INF/weblogic-application.xml of your EAR, put

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <weblogic-application>
     <application-param>
       <param-name>webapp.encoding.default</param-name>
       <param-value>UTF-8</param-value>
     </application-param>
     <prefer-application-packages>
       <package-name>com.sun.xml.*</package-name>
       <package-name>javax.xml.bind.*</package-name>
       <package-name>javax.jws.*</package-name>
       <package-name>javax.xml.soap.*</package-name>
     </prefer-application-packages>
   </weblogic-application>
   

3. Put the required JARs in the WEB-INF/lib of your WAR.

If WebLogic is reporting classloading issues, you may have to add more Java packages under the prefer-application-packages element.