Where to place the third party jars on WLS 7.0SP2

Question

Our application use the thirdparty JDBC driver, for example, the JDBC driver for
mySQL. I donot want my customer to modify startWeblogic.cmd or some file else
to make the jar file available for the applicaiton.
my question is if some directory exists under weblogic700/server where I can place
the jar file(that is, like the installed extension of JDK or JRE).
I try to place the jar file on server/ext, it does not work.
Guofeng

Answer 1

"Guofeng Zhang" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
>
Our application use the thirdparty JDBC driver, for example, the JDBCdriver for
mySQL. I donot want my customer to modify startWeblogic.cmd or some fileelse
to make the jar file available for the applicaiton.
my question is if some directory exists under weblogic700/server where Ican place
the jar file(that is, like the installed extension of JDK or JRE).
I try to place the jar file on server/ext, it does not work.
GuofengDisclaimer: I am a newcomer to the world of BEA WLS,
so try this at your own risk.
For the 3rd party classes to be found, they have to be included somewhere
in the CLASSPATH. The best place (IMO) for customisation of the CLASSPATH
is in the extEnv.sh. You will not find it in a standard installation of
WLS, but if you look in $WL_HOME/server/bin/startWLS.sh you will see this:
PATH=".${PATHSEP}${WL_HOME}/server/bin${PATHSEP}${JAVA_HOME}/jre/bin${PATHSE
P}${JAVA_HOME}/bin${PATHSEP}${PATH}"
# Import extended environment
if [ -f extEnv.sh ]; then
. extEnv.sh
fi
Note the inclusion of "." at the start of PATH. This is magic that enables
the ". extEnv.sh" command to locate the "extEnv.sh" script.
In "extEnv.sh" you can use the EXT_PRE_CLASSPATH, EXT_POST_CLASSPATH,
EXT_PRE_PATH, EXT_POST_PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH to add additional classes
and directories to the server environment.
For additional information, refer to the WebLogic Server Administration
Guide (http://e-docs.bea.com/wls/docs70/adminguide/startstop.html).
Similar, if you look in $WL_HOME/server/bin/setWLSEnv.sh you will see this:
PATH="${WL_HOME}/server/bin${PATHSEP}${JAVA_HOME}/jre/bin${PATHSEP}${JAVA_HO
ME}/bin${PATHSEP}${PATH}"
export PATH
# Import extended environment
if [ -f extEnv.sh ]; then
. extEnv.sh
fi
Note the missing "." in the PATH. This effectively means that even if
the "extEnv.sh" script exists in the current directory, then ". extEnv.sh"
command will only look along the PATH for the "extEnv.sh" script! To me,
that looks like an error (probably caused by a DOS-programmer used to
the default behavior in DOS to always look in the current directory
regardless of the setting PATH), so as part of my localised installation
procedure, I replace the offending part of setWLSEnv.sh with:
# Import extended environment
if [ -f extEnv.sh ]; then
. ./extEnv.sh
fi
which forces the "." command to read the "extEnv.sh" file in the current
directory, regardless of the setting of the PATH variable. I have
notified BEA of this, but their responses is that it is per design!
Regards,
Jan Bruun Andersen