Hi

I'm currently developing a prototype that relies in Java EE 7. Maven is used for dependency management and its plugin maven-ear-plugin for the final build of an EAR. The latter is then deployed on a wildfly 10.0 application server.

The project structure is as follows (simplified):

- controler-api

- controler-impl

- model-api

- model-impl

- system-parent (maven parent package)

- system-ear (to generate ear)

- view-webapp

The EAR consists of the two ejb3 modules "controler-impl" and "model-impl", as well as the web app "view-webapp". The maven-ear-plugin is configured accordingly:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-ear-plugin</artifactId>
    <configuration>
        <defaultLibBundleDir>lib</defaultLibBundleDir>
        <generatedDescriptorLocation>META-INF</generatedDescriptorLocation>
        <modules>
            <ejbModule>
                <groupId>com.domain.abc</groupId>
                <artifactId>model-impl</artifactId>
            </ejbModule>
            <ejbModule>
                <groupId>com.domain.abc</groupId>
                <artifactId>controler-impl</artifactId>
            </ejbModule>
             <webModule>
                <groupId>com.domain.abc</groupId>
                <artifactId>view-webapp</artifactId>
                <contextRoot>/myapp</contextRoot>
            </webModule>
        </modules>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

So far, everything has worked out well and the prototype is already in decent state.

However, I have been facing a complicated problem for some days I cannot cope with:

In the controler-impl, I want to use reflections (org.reflections) to determine classes that have been enriched with a specific annotation. Hence, I added the corresponding dependency and the jar reflections-0.9.10.jar is stored in the lib folder of the EAR correctly. But at run time, I always encounter a ClassNotFoundException showing me that the class loader in the ejb module controler-impl is not able to find the classes in reflections-0.9.10.jar. For debugging, I went through the class loader hierarchy and checked which packages and classes are available for them.

I found three class loaders:

1) ModuleClassLoader

    |

2) AppClassLoader

    |

3) ExtClassLoader

None of them are able to access the classes in reflections-0.9.10.jar deposited in the central EAR lib folder. This is weird as I expected this key folder to be accessible by the all ear modules.

Of course, I looked for existing solutions in the web. For instance, I found the following article explaining the class loader hierarchy/separation in more details.

Packaging EJB 3 Applications - Developer.com

Based on Table 2 in this article, I assumed that I have to add a manifest file in the ejb module. Of course, I tried this by changing configuration of the maven-ear-plugin or even adding the maven-ejb-plugin to the modules. But I always encounter the error "Class Path [...] in [...] does not point to a valid jar for a Class-Path reference" and the basic problem of the missing reference to the EAR lib folder still exists.

I guess that I likely have to configure the maven-ear-plugin and/or maven-ejb-plugin better (whatever that means) - does anybody have an idea how to do that? Or did I miss something important regarding Wildfly (10)?

Thanks a lot

Nicolas