BUG?: JBoss class loader issue with multiple web application

[gfzhang]

We packaged two web applications in a J2EE application.

We found that when we access a web application, JBoss load the classes in another web application's WEB-INF/lib or WEB-INF/classes.(the incorrectly loaded classes is not place in the jar files in EJB container or JBoss's default lib or CLASSPATH).

THis occurs in JBoss 3.2.3, but never occures in JBoss 3.0.8-Tomcat-4.1.24.

The following is the description.
(1)the build script has problem, it copy an older version jar file to the WEB-INFO/lib, this jar file is used by web application to parse the XML file that define the screen layout. We found that the XML file cannot be parsed when we port our J2EE application to JBoss 3.2.3. It happens that we develop a tool to tell use where the class is loaded from. It tell us that the class is loaded in another web app's WEB-INF/llib(This web app never use the XML parser function of the jar, so the build script problem is not found before). We solve the problem and the application works fine in JBoss 3.2.3.
(2)For release, the release engineer use Jsper to pre-compile the JSP files to WEB-INF/classes. there is a hello.jsp file in each application, it is used to direct the request to a specific page in a web app. It is placed in the root of the web application (for example, mywebapp.war/hello.jsp). This hello.jsp is configured as a welcome file in web.xml. We found that when we acces a web app, we are directed to the specified page in another web app. This never occurs in JBoss 3.0.8-Tomcat 4.1.24, so we can confirm that our build script does not place the generated classes incorrectly.

My question is, is it a bug of JBoss, or we have to make some addtional configuration for JBoss 3.2.3.

Thanks for your help.

[juha]

Set UseJBossWebLoader=false to get the same behavior as in 3.0.x (jbossweb-tomcat/META-INF/jboss-service.xml)

[marc.fleury]

I had asked scott whether the default behavior of classloaders was changed recently across EAR files. I see too many guys that didn't have the problem in 3.0 where visibility was COMPLETE (that was the whole point of it) to having to go with J2EE standard mess and packaging hell.

what is going on?

[juha]

Visibility was not complete in case of WEB-INF/lib and WEB-INF/classes before, now it is but when people deploy same app multiple times they don't expect this behavior.

That's what the JBossWebLoader attribute does, it switches the WEB-INF to either one way (servlet can see flat space but others don't see its WEB-INF) or two-way (default, WEB-INF is added to the flat namespace).

[gfzhang]

It works well, thanks all of you.

[julien.dubois]

Juha,

Of course users don't expect this kind of behavior. It was already the case with EARs in 3.0 with the UCL from hell. It just went even worse.
Nobody expect an app server to work this way, and BTW JBoss is the only one to do so. I just hope this will be clarified in the next version of J2EE, so you guys are forced to do a "normal" classloader.
I'm sorry for the flaming, but I am *so* annoyed by the UCL.