XSLT transfer fails because Weblogic cannot find a class located in rt.jar

Question

We have encountered a very strange class not found problem in our web app running on Weblogic 10.3. In our code we do a pretty standard XSLT transformation.

UtilRequestManagerBean.java:

TransformerFactory tFactory = TransformerFactory.newInstance();
Transformer transformer = tFactory.newTransformer(new StreamSource(new StringReader(xslBuffer.toString())));            
transformer.transform(new StreamSource(new StringReader(sourceBuffer.toString())), new StreamResult(sw));

This fails in our production environment (Solaris 10, if that matters) and produces a java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:

<Mar 11, 2010 1:44:08 PM EET> <Info> <EJB> <BEA-010227> <EJB Exception occurred during invocation from home or business: com.company.basicservice.ejb.util.UtilRequestManagerBean_temuyq_HomeImpl@1737be7 threw exception: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class com.sun.org.apache.xalan.internal.xsltc.runtime.BasisLibrary>

This class is part of rt.jar and is definitely in classpath. This is verified by the following Weblogic log snippet:

sun.boot.class.path = /opt/jdk1.6.0_12/jre/lib/resources.jar:/opt/jdk1.6.0_12/jre/lib/rt.jar:/opt/jdk1.6.0_12/jre/lib/sunrsasign.jar:/opt/jdk1.6.0_12/jre/lib/jsse.jar:/opt/jdk1.6.0_12/jre/lib/jce.jar:/opt/jdk1.6.0_12/jre/lib/charsets.jar:/opt/jdk1.6.0_12/jre/classes

And finally listing the contents of rt.jar shows that the class is there:

jar tvf /opt/jdk1.6.0_12/jre/lib/rt.jar | grep BasisLibrary.class
24787 Sat Jan 17 02:25:58 EET 2009 com/sun/org/apache/xalan/internal/xsltc/runtime/BasisLibrary.class

So, what on earth could be the problem here?

Answer 1

NoClassDefFoundError does not necessarily mean the Class was not found - it means the correct version of the class was not loaded.

Most likely multiple versions of the class getting loaded. Can you check if there is a source of conflict - example some classes are bundled in weblogic.jar as well.

Check for this package org/apache/xalan/internal/xsltc/runtime/BasisLibrary or the BasisLibrary class itself - is it present ?

Or try by putting rt.jar as the first jar in the classpath