A number of people have asked about the ‘ModuleException: [HTTP:101216]Servlet:’ error I came across as part of the multi-platform Dice Service example. The experiences are covered in three (first problem, second problem, solved) separate articles which I will collate and summerise here.

Use ant to build web app
Some JEE 5 containers allow you to define your annotated classes and then drop them in an ‘autodeploy’ folder. Not with WebLogic Server v10 though, an ant script is required to do some more work on the web application. Interestingly, the WLS documentation does not refer to autodeploy for web services, in fact according to the WLS Web Service documentation a weblogic ant task ‘JwscTask’ is needed to compile the annotated web service and produce the necessary WAR and EAR for deployment.

Without the JwscTask, simply dropping a JAX-WS web app in the deplopyment folder will give you an deployment error like this:

The deployment error is:
weblogic.application.ModuleException:
 [HTTP:101216]Servlet: "DiceServicePort"
     failed to preload on startup in Web application:
            "WebServices.war".
javax.servlet.ServletException: Servlet class:
    'soastation.jaxwsdice.Dice' does not implement
            javax.servlet.Servlet

Tell JwscTask the type
Not only is an ant script required to invoke weblogic.wsee.tools.anttasks.JwscTask but when using it with JAX-WS web services you must set the type attribute. The guidelines in the WLS documentation states that the ant tasks need to have a type=”JAXWS” attribute set. Without this, WLS will treat the web service as a JAX-RPC service.

Summary
To deploy JAX-WS web services on WebLogic Server v10 use JwscTask, with type=”JASWS”, in an ant script. Of course, if you are going to the effort of putting an ant script together to build the web application, it might as well have it deploy the web app too.