Spring Boot App deployed to Weblogic 11g Won't Start

Question

I'm having some issues deploying a Spring Boot application to a Weblogic 10.3.3 Server. I'm desperately crossing my fingers in hopes that someone has seen this issue before. I use Weblogic's admin console to perform the deployment (and that seems to go well), but I get an error from Weblogic when I attempt to start the application:

Caused By: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Invalid source 'com.example.Application'
    at org.springframework.boot.BeanDefinitionLoader.load(BeanDefinitionLoader.java:223)
    at org.springframework.boot.BeanDefinitionLoader.load(BeanDefinitionLoader.java:144)
    at org.springframework.boot.BeanDefinitionLoader.load(BeanDefinitionLoader.java:127)
    at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.load(SpringApplication.java:620)
    at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.run(SpringApplication.java:315)
    at org.springframework.boot.builder.SpringApplicationBuilder.run(SpringApplicationBuilder.java:139)
    at org.springframework.boot.legacy.context.web.SpringBootContextLoaderListener.initWebApplicationContext(SpringBootContextLoaderListener.java:61)
    at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener.contextInitialized(ContextLoaderListener.java:106)
    at weblogic.servlet.internal.EventsManager$FireContextListenerAction.run(EventsManager.java:481)
    at weblogic.security.acl.internal.AuthenticatedSubject.doAs(AuthenticatedSubject.java:321)
    at weblogic.security.service.SecurityManager.runAs(SecurityManager.java:121)
    at weblogic.servlet.internal.EventsManager.notifyContextCreatedEvent(EventsManager.java:181)
    at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppServletContext.preloadResources(WebAppServletContext.java:1863)
    at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppServletContext.start(WebAppServletContext.java:3126)
    at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppModule.startContexts(WebAppModule.java:1512)
    at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppModule.start(WebAppModule.java:486)
    at weblogic.application.internal.flow.ModuleStateDriver$3.next(ModuleStateDriver.java:425)
    at weblogic.application.utils.StateMachineDriver.nextState(StateMachineDriver.java:41)
    at weblogic.application.internal.flow.ModuleStateDriver.start(ModuleStateDriver.java:119)
    at weblogic.application.internal.flow.ScopedModuleDriver.start(ScopedModuleDriver.java:200)
    at weblogic.application.internal.flow.ModuleListenerInvoker.start(ModuleListenerInvoker.java:247)
    at weblogic.application.internal.flow.ModuleStateDriver$3.next(ModuleStateDriver.java:425)
    at weblogic.application.utils.StateMachineDriver.nextState(StateMachineDriver.java:41)
    at weblogic.application.internal.flow.ModuleStateDriver.start(ModuleStateDriver.java:119)
    at weblogic.application.internal.flow.StartModulesFlow.activate(StartModulesFlow.java:27)
    at weblogic.application.internal.BaseDeployment$2.next(BaseDeployment.java:1267)
    at weblogic.application.utils.StateMachineDriver.nextState(StateMachineDriver.java:41)
    at weblogic.application.internal.BaseDeployment.activate(BaseDeployment.java:409)
    at weblogic.application.internal.SingleModuleDeployment.activate(SingleModuleDeployment.java:43)
    at weblogic.application.internal.DeploymentStateChecker.activate(DeploymentStateChecker.java:161)
    at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.AppContainerInvoker.activate(AppContainerInvoker.java:79)
    at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.AbstractOperation.activate(AbstractOperation.java:569)
    at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.ActivateOperation.activateDeployment(ActivateOperation.java:150)
    at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.ActivateOperation.doCommit(ActivateOperation.java:116)
    at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.StartOperation.doCommit(StartOperation.java:143)
    at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.AbstractOperation.commit(AbstractOperation.java:323)
    at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentManager.handleDeploymentCommit(DeploymentManager.java:844)
    at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentManager.activateDeploymentList(DeploymentManager.java:1253)
    at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentManager.handleCommit(DeploymentManager.java:440)
    at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentServiceDispatcher.commit(DeploymentServiceDispatcher.java:163)
    at weblogic.deploy.service.internal.targetserver.DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.doCommitCallback(DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.java:195)
    at weblogic.deploy.service.internal.targetserver.DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.access$100(DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.java:13)
    at weblogic.deploy.service.internal.targetserver.DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer$2.run(DeploymentReceiverCallbackDeliverer.java:68)
    at weblogic.work.SelfTuningWorkManagerImpl$WorkAdapterImpl.run(SelfTuningWorkManagerImpl.java:528)
    at weblogic.work.ExecuteThread.execute(ExecuteThread.java:201)
    at weblogic.work.ExecuteThread.run(ExecuteThread.java:173)

The app is deployed as a WAR file using spring-boot-legacy and a web.xml. It runs fine on Tomcat 6/7/8. Here are my relevant config files:

web.xml

<web-app version="2.5" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd">

<context-param>
    <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
    <param-value>com.example.Application</param-value>
</context-param>

<listener>
    <listener-class>org.springframework.boot.legacy.context.web.SpringBootContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
</listener>

<listener>
    <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.request.RequestContextListener</listener-class>
</listener>

<filter>
    <filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
    <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.DelegatingFilterProxy</filter-class>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
    <dispatcher>ERROR</dispatcher>
    <dispatcher>REQUEST</dispatcher>
</filter-mapping>

<servlet>
    <servlet-name>helloWorld</servlet-name>
    <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
    <init-param>
        <param-name>contextAttribute</param-name>
        <param-value>org.springframework.web.context.WebApplicationContext.ROOT</param-value>
    </init-param>
    <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>helloWorld</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

weblogic.xml

<wls:weblogic-web-app 
xmlns:wls="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/weblogic-web-app" 
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/weblogic-web-app 
    http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/weblogic-web-app/1.0/weblogic-web-app.xsd">

<wls:context-root>helloWorld</wls:context-root>

<wls:container-descriptor>
    <wls:prefer-application-packages>
        <wls:package-name>org.slf4j.*</wls:package-name>
    </wls:prefer-application-packages>
</wls:container-descriptor>

Tracing through the stack trace, it appears that Spring Boot's BeanDefinitionLoader class attempts to load the source classes (in my case, just com.example.Application) but fails because it doesn't see it as a class, resource, or package. Looking at the BeanDefinitionLoader class here: BeanDefinitionLoader.java (line 187), it appears that my Application class should get loaded as a Class. Like I mentioned, it does work great in Tomcat, just not in Weblogic.

Is there something Weblogic-specific that I'm missing? Could it be a file encoding issue? Am I missing something from my web.xml?

Thanks for your time!

Update #1

After exhausting Google and StackOverflow for things to try, I added the spring.main.sources: com.example.Application to my application.yml. It had no effect.

My current hunch right now is that the contextAttribute parameter in my web.xml might have something to do with my issue. Just unsure what else I can change it to. Thoughts?

Answer 1

Check that your building your war with the same version of Java as the Weblogic server is running. Eg if it's 1.6 set JAVA_HOME to your 1.6 JDK before running gradle build.