WLS 8.1 SP4 and web-inf/lib ClassNotFoundExceptions

Question

Hi
Is anyone else having problems with this issue ?
I saw it was resolved (CR161884 & CR173695) in the 8.1 SP3 release, but I'm unable to deploy a web app (either through the console or in the applications directory of the domain) in SP4 as the classloader can't see my JAR file in WEB-INF/lib.
<30-Dec-2004 15:51:47 o'clock GMT> <Error> <Deployer> <BEA-149201> <Failed to co
mplete the deployment task with ID 7 for the application appsdirdp-application
-1.0-SNAPSHOT_war.
weblogic.management.DeploymentException:
Exception:weblogic.management.ApplicationException: start() failed.
        Module: dp-application-1.0-SNAPSHOT     Error: weblogic.management.Deplo
ymentException: org/picocontainer/gems/StaticFactory - with nested exception:
[java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/picocontainer/gems/StaticFactory]Inside my WAR file, I have a WEB-INF\lib directory, containing picocontainer-gems-1.1-SNAPSHOT.jar which contains the org.picocontainer.gems.StaticFactory class.
I've tried deploying the app both with and without a weblogic.xml file declaring prefer-web-inf-classes set to true.
Rgs
Erik

Answer 1

Just as a check, I moved the JAR files to a common lib directory on the server and added them to the system classpath specified in startWeblogic.cmd, and the application starts fine.
Maybe not related, but yesterday I was tried deploying an EJB that was dependent on a JAR file NOT included within its JAR file, but specified with the Class-path entry in the manifest.
The behaviour I saw was WLS swallowed the ClassNotFoundException silently, the admin console reported that the EJB was deployed successfully but inside the ejbCreate method - I had two print line statements, one prior to calling the missing class, and one after. Only the one prior appeared on the system console, suggesting that the ejbCreate method wasn't completing, yet no exception is thrown ?