How to deploy Axis2.war to JBoss 5

In order to use LiveCycle Data Services 3, I decided to upgrade to JBoss 5. When I attempted to add in the axis2.war file to the {JBoss_Home}/server/default/deploy directory, I got a whack of errors when I started up the server. The main complaint was that the server barfed up the “Failed to create a new SAX parser” and several subsequent errors. The issue is that there are older versions of certain jars within the axis2.war file that won’t work and cause a java.lang.ClassCastException. In particular, the org.apache.xerces.parsers.XML11Configuration cannot be cast to org.apache.xerces.xni.parser.XMLParserConfiguration

So how do you solve it? It is not too hard but a bit tricky. First, open up the axis2.war file. On Mac OS X, you can do this by using StuffIt.app. Just navigate in finder to the directory containing axis2.war, control-click, select “Open with…”, and then choose ~/Applications/StuffIt.app. This will expand the WAR file in the same directory.

Within the directory, there are two files you have to get rid of. I first tried to delete xml-apis-1.3.04.jar and xercesImpl-2.8.1.jar thinking that should work. This is shown below.



It actually did but lead to another problem (later). To get all the files back into a war, you have to do two things. The first is to use the command "jar -cvf ". Since I wanted to rename the output to axis2.war, I navigated to the directory holding the META-INF, WEB-INF, etc. files and rant the command "jar -cvf axis2.war *". This made the war file, which is essentially a *.jar file.



After this, on a Unix-based system, you have to change the permissions to ensure the file is usable by the app server. Use the chmod 775 command for that as shown below.


Figuring I had this problem licked, I started up the appserver. It started fine, however when I went to navigate to the http://localhost:8080/axis2/ URL, I got another error. This time is was a mismatch in impedance between the JSP servlet jars. The error comes out as "The method getJspApplicationContext(ServletContext) is undefined for the type JspFactory". The problem is that the build of axis2 I downloaded had an older version that did not have the same method. Once again, to rectify this, open up the axis2.war file and remove another file called "servlet-api-2.3.jar". Repackage the war file and chmod it so that it is executable by the app server.


JBoss 5 should start up perfectly and you should now see the happy axis page when you navigate to http://localhost:8080/axis2/ as shown below. Problem Solved!!

Flash Builder 4 Tutorial - AMF

This tutorial is from Adobe Developer Connection and it shows how to use Flash Builder 4 beta 2 with BlazeDS AMF endpoints. The concepts are simple and if you download and start up the Vancouver build of BlazeDS (here), you can run this. You will have to ensure you have Java installed and configured properly as described in this tutorial. Have fun! This project has to be built from scratch as the source code will have paths specific to my system.