What is needed on non-weblogic client to make soap request

Question

Hi, I am trying to make a soap request from a client that is not weblogic to a
weblogic6.1 server. I was under the impression that all I needed was the client.jar
created by wsgen. But when I try to access the service through the client I get
the below exception. It appears to be trying to access a weblogic class that is
not contained in the client.jar. Does this mean I also need to include the weblogic.jar
on the client(I'm hoping not to). Thanks
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: weblogic/net/http/HttpsURLConnection
     at weblogic.soap.http.SoapContext.lookup(SoapContext.java:87)
     at javax.naming.InitialContext.lookup(InitialContext.java:350)
     at index_1._jspService(index_1.java:68)
     at org.apache.jasper.runtime.HttpJspBase.service(HttpJspBase.java:119)
     at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java)
     at org.apache.tomcat.facade.ServletHandler.doService(ServletHandler.java:574)
     at org.apache.tomcat.core.Handler.invoke(Handler.java:322)
     at org.apache.tomcat.core.Handler.service(Handler.java:235)
     at org.apache.tomcat.facade.ServletHandler.service(ServletHandler.java:485)
     at org.apache.tomcat.core.ContextManager.internalService(ContextManager.java:917)
     at org.apache.tomcat.core.ContextManager.service(ContextManager.java:833)
     at org.apache.tomcat.modules.server.Http10Interceptor.processConnection(Http10Interceptor.java:176)
     at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.TcpWorkerThread.runIt(PoolTcpEndpoint.java:494)
     at org.apache.tomcat.util.threads.ThreadPool$ControlRunnable.run(ThreadPool.java:516)
     at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:484)

Answer 1

Hi Jane,
Looks like you have run smack dab into one of the first "myths" about web services
- "SOAP client software is not vendor- dependent" :-) This is in fact, exactly
the opposite! And it's not just WebLogic's SOAP client API that has this "vendor-dependent"
code. Apache SOAP, Apache AXIS, Systinet WASP, GLUE, etc. exhibit the same behavior.
The difference is that WebLogic's client.jar, is not really a "standalone, SOAP
client package". It's a "web service-specific" client package.
JAX-RPC (and the other APIs in the Java Web Services Developer's Pack) is attempting
to reduce a fair amount of this "vendor-dependency", but there will always be
some :-) WLS 6.1 doesn't use JAX-RPC, so...
Anyway, how many "vendor classes" you need, depends on what you are attempting
to do in the client. If you are just consuming a web service that uses "SOAP encoding",
then you'll need less. If you are consuming a web service that uses "literal encoding",
you'll need more. An easy (albeit time consuming) way to figure out which classes
you need from the weblogic.jar file, to use WebLogic's Web Service client package
inside Tomcat, is to use the "-verbose:class" option, on the Java command used
to start Tomcat. This will produce a lot of output, so I suggest you capture it
to a log, instead of sending it to stdout :-) But, as I said, this is a very,
very, very time consuming way to determine all the classes you need from the weblogic.jar
file. Trust me, I've done this before and it took me about 3 hours to find every
class that's needed! It's simpler just to include the weblogic.jar file in the
CLASSPATH you start Tomcat with :-)
Another option is to just use the Apache SOAP package to create the web service
client. This works wonderfully, if you don't want to use WSDL (Apache SOAP doesn't
support WSDL). If you want to use WSDL, go with the Apache AXIS package. It has
an implementation of JAX-RPC, and is pretty close to the Web Services implementation
in WLS 7.0 (which I'm assuming you'll eventually upgrade to anyway, right?).
Regards,
Mike Wooten
"Jane" <[email protected]> wrote:
>
Hi, I am trying to make a soap request from a client that is not weblogic
to a
weblogic6.1 server. I was under the impression that all I needed was
the client.jar
created by wsgen. But when I try to access the service through the client
I get
the below exception. It appears to be trying to access a weblogic class
that is
not contained in the client.jar. Does this mean I also need to include
the weblogic.jar
on the client(I'm hoping not to). Thanks
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: weblogic/net/http/HttpsURLConnection
     at weblogic.soap.http.SoapContext.lookup(SoapContext.java:87)
     at javax.naming.InitialContext.lookup(InitialContext.java:350)
     at index_1._jspService(index_1.java:68)
     at org.apache.jasper.runtime.HttpJspBase.service(HttpJspBase.java:119)
     at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java)
     at org.apache.tomcat.facade.ServletHandler.doService(ServletHandler.java:574)
     at org.apache.tomcat.core.Handler.invoke(Handler.java:322)
     at org.apache.tomcat.core.Handler.service(Handler.java:235)
     at org.apache.tomcat.facade.ServletHandler.service(ServletHandler.java:485)
     at org.apache.tomcat.core.ContextManager.internalService(ContextManager.java:917)
     at org.apache.tomcat.core.ContextManager.service(ContextManager.java:833)
     at org.apache.tomcat.modules.server.Http10Interceptor.processConnection(Http10Interceptor.java:176)
     at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.TcpWorkerThread.runIt(PoolTcpEndpoint.java:494)
     at org.apache.tomcat.util.threads.ThreadPool$ControlRunnable.run(ThreadPool.java:516)
     at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:484)