We've been using cactus 1.6 productively for over 6 months, against WebLogic
6.1. We are now starting to have some problems that I believe are related to
the classloader heirarchy of WebLogic and I wonder if anyone has any advice.
We had no problems until somebody modified one of the objects under test from
having a public constructor to a protected constructor. Now we get an illegal
access exception:
java.lang.IllegalAccessError: try to access method
com.mbasys.mars.pricing.PricingCalcs.<init>()V from class
com.mbasys.mars.pricing.ServerTestPricingCalcs at ...
The test case is simply constructing the object under test at the line in
question:
package com.mbasys.mars.pricing;
...
protected void setUp() throws Exception
{
super.setUp();
insertCommonDataIntoDatabase("commonly-used.xml");
insertIntoDatabase("pricing-setup.xml");
pc = new PricingCalcs(); // <----------- This line bombs !!!!!!!!!!
}
If I change the PricingCalcs constructor back to public it works fine. We see
this same type of problem with any test that tries to access protected or
package level items.
The ServletTestCase implementation is in the same package
(com.mbasys.mars.pricing) as the application class under test (PricingCalcs).
I do this intentionally when writing unit tests (as most do) to allow testing
of protected and package level methods. However I don't think that matters in
this case, because the test case is loaded by the webapp ClassLoader but the
application class is loaded by the EJB ClassLoader (which is the parent
classloader of the webapp).
WebLogic has this kind of ClassLoader heirarchy AFAIK:
WebApp ClassLoader -> EJB ClassLoader -> System ClassLoader
The cactus test cases are deployed to the cactus webapp's WEB-INF/classes dir
so we can hot deploy them. I'd hate to lose that capability.
The application classes are in the EJB ClassLoader's classpath since the EJBs
reference the app classes.
I've tried deploying the application classes to cactus webapp's WEB-INF/classes
alongside the test cases and it clears up the (IllegalAccessException) issue
mentioned above, but creates some new ugly ClassLoader issues ones which I can
detail if need be. Briefly: One issue was that our application looks up a
service in JNDI which depends on some appplication classes/interfaces so we got
ClassCastExceptions when accessing these objects in the testcases. I've
tried excluding select application classes from the cactus webapp's
WEB-INF/classes dir but it just seems to get messier and messier.
Any ideas?
