Glassfishv3 not adding jars in ear to the classpath

Question

I have been working on this problem for one whole day but in vain without any effective solution.

I have an ear file packaged with an ejb and a handful of jar files (including hibernate and the other dependent jar files).The ejb is stateless and enabled as a web service.

The ear file has been packaged using maven and has the below structure

ear->projectrelatedejb.jar

->hibernate.jar

->otherdependent. jar

->META-INF/application.xml

->META-INF/manifest.mf

The application.xml and manifest file are automatically generated by maven when I do a package.

When I deploy this ear file on glassfish it gets deployed with the ejb methods being accessible using web services. However when accessing the application (using soapui), the ejb methods that perform some database functionality using hibernate throw java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError for the hibernate api during runtime.

It is obvious from the error that the hibernate jars are not on the classpath during runtime but since the jars are within the ear Glassfish should have added it to the application classpath.

I tried various options like adding the classpath entries to the manifest.mf during the package (by using the element addClasspath with the maven-ear-plugin) which didn't do any good.Also with Glassfish we cannot add the dependent jars as modules to the application.xml unless the jars are application client jars (Glassfish wouldn't deploy the ear file if the application.xml has the dependent jars declared as modules).

I also tried placing the jars in the lib directory within the ear (which isn't actually required) and with the manifest Class-Path header referencing the jars in the lib directory which also didn't fix the problem.

The quick and dirty fix which I can do to get this working is to place the hibernate and the other the dependent jars in Glassfish's lib directory.However,this is a bad practice and I am somewhat reluctant to do it.

I would really appreciate if someone can provide me with a working solution to this problem.I have gone through the net looking for this problem but couldn't find any solution.

Wondering if its a bug with glassfish or does glassfish need something special to reference the jars in an ear.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I found a similar problem which is discussed here: http://www.tricoder.net/blog/?p=59.

Simply put, try putting the libraries in EAR/lib directory and according to JEE5 spec, glassfish will add them to class path automatically.

Answer 2

I used Server Library option to deploy application JARs and it worked for me. Right click on your EAR-> Properties -> Libraries-> Add Library -> Create -> give name and change type in Library Type to Server Libraries then add JARs that should be deployed and confirm.

I work with NetBeans 7.0.1 and GlassFish server 3.1

Answer 3

When you say you added classpath entries to manifest.mf, which manifest.mf do you refer to? The one in ear-root/META-INF/manifest.mf ? Try adding a META-INF/MANIFEST.MF to your ejb module with Class-Path entries!