Re: Running Struts on weblogic - more info

Question

Below is a response that was snipped from the struts-user mail list. Yet
          another case of BEA dis-information! When will you guys finally admit that you
          don't totally support the JSP1.1/Servlet2.2 specification. SOS. (Same old
          S..t)
          The responses below are from Craig McClanahan who is one of the guys in involved
          in struts. I believe he is responsible for the effort, but don't quote me on
          that!
          WebLogic wrote:
          > You should be able to get past this point with service pack 5. One of the
          > problems with struts is that some of
          > the pages take advantage of non-standard behaviour in Tomcat, however. For
          > example, in the bean-cookie.jsp
          > test they attempt to set a property on a bean that was never useBeaned.
          > Section 2.13.2, JSP 1.1 spec:
          >
          ---------------------------- Begin Quote
          The "bean-cookie.jsp" actually uses <jsp:getProperty>, not <jsp:setProperty>.
          In this particular case the relevant spec language is Section 2.13.3:
          "An <jsp:getProperty> action places the value of a Bean instance
          property, converted to a String, into the implicit out object, from
          which you can display the value as output. The Bean instance
          must be defined as indicated in the name attribute before this point
          in the page (usually via a useBean action).
          Note the word "usually" -- the reason it is here is because custom tags can be
          defining elements as well, as long as they use the corresponding TagExtraInfo
          class and, in the tag, call pageContext.setAttribute() appropriately. In this
          page, the call
          <bean:cookie id="sess" name="JSESSIONID"/>
          is the defining element that looks up the cookie named "JSESSIONID" (more on
          that
          name below) and exposes it as a JSP bean. This tag precedes the use of the bean
          in statements like this:
          <jsp:getProperty name="sess" property="domain"/>
          which looks up the "domain" property of the cookie (i.e. it calls getDomain())
          and
          writes that to the output stream.
          Thus, this page conforms to the JSP 1.1 spec requirements.
          ---------------------------- End Quote
          >
          > The name of a Bean instance defined by a <jsp:useBean> element or some other
          > element. The Bean instance must contain the property you want to set. The
          > defining element (in JSP 1.1 only a <jsp:useBean> element) must appear
          > before the <jsp:setProperty> element in the same file.
          >
          ---------------------------- Begin Quote
          Note the phrase "or some other element" -- again, custom beans can be defining
          elements, so this page would be valid even if it had been using
          <jsp:setProperty>
          instead. It is interesting to note that the corresponding paragraph in the JSP
          1.2 draft specification (Section 4.2.2.1, p. 63) has been clarified to indicate
          this:
          "The name of a Bean instance defined by a <jsp:useBean>
          or some other element. The Bean instance must contain the
          property you want to set. The defining element must appear
          before the <jsp:setProperty> element in the same file.
          so the confusing parenthetical comment about <jsp:useBean> has been removed.
          Even
          if it's a little inconsistent in 1.1, the intent is clear -- custom tags can be
          defining elements for JSP-accessible beans. That is the whole point of the
          TagExtraInfo functionality.
          ---------------------------- End Quote
          > They also hard-code the Tomcat session identifier into the tests. If you
          > want them to work either change the weblogic cookie name to JSESSIONID or
          > change the references to JSESSIONID to WebLogicSession.
          >
          ---------------------------- Begin Quote
          Servlet API Specification, Version 2.2, Section 7.1.2, p. 35:
          "Session tracking through HTTP cookies is the most used
          session tracking mechanism and is required to be supported
          by all servlet containers. The container sends a cookie to the
          client. The client will then return the cookie on each subsequent
          request to the server unambiguously associating the request
          with a session. The name of the session tracking cookie must
          be JSESSIONID.
          Prior to 2.2, the servlet container could use whatever cookie name it wanted.
          However, for 2.2 onwards, the cookie name is fixed for all containers.
          There may well be spec compliance issues with Struts that need to be fixed (such
          as the current question over whether body content can be accessed in the
          doEndTag() method of a custom tag). However, on these two issues, Struts
          complies
          with the specification.
          ---------------------------- End Quote
          Sam, it interesting that OTHER application servers can support struts. It's
          probably just a case that you don't handle the specification very well. Is this
          also why your server has not passed the J2EE compatibility tests? Oh, I'm sure
          that you guys will complain about SUN and licensing. I understand your
          complaints and I agree, but that doesn't have to do with specification
          compliance! ;^)
          BTW, everyone, there is a serious ClassCastException that should be fixed in
          service pack 6. This particular exception illustrates that BEA Weblogic 5.1 sp5
          does not support web applications properly. I created an web application under
          Tomcat3.1 and moved it to Weblogic5.1sp5. I was receiving ClassCastExceptions
          when I was trying to access an object that was passed in my JSP request and
          display it on a JSP page. I'm grateful that one of the support people finally
          fixed the problem. However, this was only a temporary patch. I'm told the
          "official patch" will be included with sp6.
          Let's hope that some day BEA Weblogic will be compliant. BTW, why is it you are
          charging so much. Oh it must be for the great support! ;-)
          If you BEA Weblogic users would like some addition links to application servers
          that support JSP1.1/Servlet2.2 specification better than Weblogic, here are two.
          http://www.orionserver.com (This is actually a full J2EE class application
          server. It has not passed the compatibility test, but they do a hell of a
          better job than BEA Weblogic. BTW, it's much cheaper too.)
          http://www.caucho.com/ (This is an open source effort. They are only in beta
          with EJB support and they are using Servlets and XML to implement the EJB
          specification. There is a charge for commercial use. Many people are using
          this engine to do the JSP/Servlets and Weblogic to do EJBs. Wonder what will
          happen when they provide EJB support?)
          You know I thought this news group was to help solve problems with Weblogic. It
          has turned into a newsgroup that tries to hide problems and respond with
          dis-information. However, this is just my opinion, just as Sam expressed his
          opinion about struts. That's assuming Sam's email was an opinion, I just
          figured it was since he did not know the JSP1.1/Servlet2.2 specification. Sorry
          if I was wrong.
          Steve
          > Sam
          >
          > "kevinx" <[email protected]> wrote in message
          > news:[email protected]...
          > > "kevinx" <[email protected]> wrote:
          > > >
          > > >I'm trying to get the Struts examples from Apache Group
          > (http://jakarta.apache.org/struts) to run on Weblogic server but getting no
          > where. The examples run perfectly on Tomcat 3.1.
          > > >
          > > >Has anyone successfully ported struts on Weblogic? Any hint is
          > appreciated.
          > > >
          > > >Thanks
          > > >Kevin
          > >
          Steven D. Wilkinson, [email protected]
          President, Elkhorn Creek Software, Inc.
          Co-author: Professional JSP, Wrox Press Inc.; ISBN: 1861003625
          Silent author: Developing Java Servlets, Sams; ISBN: 0672316005
          

Answer 1

Has anyone had any luck getting struts to run with later service packs? I've got SP6 installed and now get the following when trying to run the struts-example app:javax.servlet.jsp.JspException: Missing resources attribute org.apache.struts.action.MESSAGE at org.apache.struts.taglib.MessageTag.doStartTag(MessageTag.java:360)