Websphere 8.5 with JPA 2.1

Question

IBM used to have a feature pack to put JPA 2.0 into WAS 7. WAS 8.5.5 evidently comes with JPA 2.0. But we have an app we just upgraded to Hibernate 4, which needs JPA 2.1. I can't find a link for a WAS 8.5 feature pack to push to JPA 2.1.

Has anyone else used Hibernate 4 in WAS 8.5? If so, how? Without a feature pack, we get NoSuchMethodError on javax.persistence classes.

Answer 1

Hibernate 4.3.7.Final can be used in Websphere Application Server 8.5.5 with following configuration:

• Pack hibernate-jpa-2.1.jar in your application and set classloader policy to PARENT_LAST.

  Hibernate 4.3.7.Final is not compatible with the JPA 2.0 API provided by Websphere 8.5.5

• Set JVM property com.ibm.websphere.persistence.ApplicationsExcludedFromJpaProcessing=* to disable Websphere JPA initialization.

  Without this you will get following SAXParseException during startup as Websphere attempts to parse the persistence.xml according to JPA 2.0 schema.

Caused by: org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: expected root element {http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence}persistence
        at com.ibm.ws.jpa.management.JaxbUnmarshaller.startElement(JaxbUnmarshaller.java:310)

• Apply the work around for issue JPA-4 in your application.

  The issue was reported for using Hibernate's JPA 2 API instead of Webspheres JPA 1 API, while the work around is also applicable to Hibernate's JPA 2.1 API with some minor changes:

  You need to replace HibernatePersistence with HibernatePersistenceProvider as the former has been deprecated.

  Without this you will get following ClassCastException during startup as Hibernate's JPA 2.1 API will load all PersistenceProvider classes, including the Websphere one exposed in classpath.

Caused by: java.lang.ClassCastException: com.ibm.websphere.persistence.PersistenceProviderImpl incompatible with javax.persistence.spi.PersistenceProvider
        at javax.persistence.Persistence$1.isLoaded(Persistence.java:110)
        at org.hibernate.validator.internal.engine.resolver.JPATraversableResolver.isReachable(JPATraversableResolver.java:56)