Defining shared jars in application.xml doesn't seem to work in 8.1

[Rick Reumann]

I'm coming from a JBoss background and in some apps I've worked with we'd define common jars that are ejb and war needed in our application.xml file and everything worked fine. I'm now stuck at a place using old Bea Weblogic 8.1 and it seems like I can only define the shared jars in the manifest file definitions. When I try and use application.xml to declare the shared jars that I want my ejb and webapp to use, weblogic complains with class not found errors.

The docs seem to be confusing on the issue. On one hand they have these docs on application.xml
http://e-docs.bea.com/wls/docs81/programming/app_xml.html#1007302

but in another area it mentions having to use the manifest files for declaring external jar dependencies.

[Rick Reumann]

After doing even more research, I think what I was doing in JBoss wasn't really standard. Not positive though.

[Jaikiran Pai]

Originally posted by Rick Reumann:
After doing even more research, I think what I was doing in JBoss wasn't really standard. Not positive though.

You are right, JBoss allows you to declared those shared libraries in the application.xml file as a < java> module. But ideally, the < java> module is meant to represent an "application-client" in J2EE.

You might want to have a look at this article, which speaks of packaging utility classes in a portable J2EE application.