Websphere 8.5 ClassCastException on migrating webservice application

Question

We are in process of upgrading our appservers and moving all the applications deployed in websphere 5 to websphere 8.5.

We are not able to bring up a webservice application. There is no problem in deploying the ear file, but when tried to deploy( ServiceManagerClient deploy) the webservice, it throws the error

Unsupported response content type "text/html; charset=utf-8", must be: "text/xml". Response was: Error 500: java.lang.ClassCastException: org.apache.soap.server.ServiceManager incompatible with org.apache.soap.server.ServiceManager

I tried all ways I could possibly think of.

First I tried replacing the old soap.jar in the application classpath with the com.ibm.ws.prereq.soap.jar found under /AppServer/plugins

Then I completely removed the soap.jar from the application classpath and put the com.ibm.ws.prereq.soap.jar in /AppServer/lib directory but still got the same error.

I also searched the whole AppServer directory for org.apache.soap.server.ServiceManager class in any of the jars and tried to add the jar in the classpath of the application with no luck.

I am able to deploy the webservice without any issue in WAS 5.5 and Was 7.

FFDC incident logged on server side

[9/27/14 17:17:34:938 CDT]     FFDC Exception:java.lang.ClassCastException SourceId:com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.filter.WebAppFilterManager.invokeFilters -RE ProbeId:1123 Reporter:com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.filter.WebAppFilterManagerImpl@f04030c
java.lang.ClassCastException: org.apache.soap.server.ServiceManager incompatible with org.apache.soap.server.ServiceManager
    at org.apache.soap.server.http.ServerHTTPUtils.getServiceManagerFromContext(ServerHTTPUtils.java:112)
    at org.apache.soap.server.http.RPCRouterServlet.doPost(RPCRouterServlet.java:277)
    at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:595)
    at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:668)
    at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.servlet.ServletWrapper.service(ServletWrapper.java:1224)
    at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.servlet.ServletWrapper.handleRequest(ServletWrapper.java:774)
    at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.servlet.ServletWrapper.handleRequest(ServletWrapper.java:456)
    at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.servlet.ServletWrapperImpl.handleRequest(ServletWrapperImpl.java:178)
    at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.filter.WebAppFilterManager.invokeFilters(WebAppFilterManager.java:1032)
    at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.webapp.WebApp.handleRequest(WebApp.java:3748)
    at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.webapp.WebGroup.handleRequest(WebGroup.java:304)
    at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.WebContainer.handleRequest(WebContainer.java:962)
    at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.WSWebContainer.handleRequest(WSWebContainer.java:1662)
    at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.channel.WCChannelLink.ready(WCChannelLink.java:195)
    at com.ibm.ws.http.channel.inbound.impl.HttpInboundLink.handleDiscrimination(HttpInboundLink.java:459)
    at com.ibm.ws.http.channel.inbound.impl.HttpInboundLink.handleNewRequest(HttpInboundLink.java:526)
    at com.ibm.ws.http.channel.inbound.impl.HttpInboundLink.processRequest(HttpInboundLink.java:312)
    at com.ibm.ws.http.channel.inbound.impl.HttpInboundLink.ready(HttpInboundLink.java:283)
    at com.ibm.ws.tcp.channel.impl.NewConnectionInitialReadCallback.sendToDiscriminators(NewConnectionInitialReadCallback.java:214)
    at com.ibm.ws.tcp.channel.impl.NewConnectionInitialReadCallback.complete(NewConnectionInitialReadCallback.java:113)
    at com.ibm.ws.tcp.channel.impl.AioReadCompletionListener.futureCompleted(AioReadCompletionListener.java:165)
    at com.ibm.io.async.AbstractAsyncFuture.invokeCallback(AbstractAsyncFuture.java:217)
    at com.ibm.io.async.AsyncChannelFuture.fireCompletionActions(AsyncChannelFuture.java:161)
    at com.ibm.io.async.AsyncFuture.completed(AsyncFuture.java:138)
    at com.ibm.io.async.ResultHandler.complete(ResultHandler.java:204)
    at com.ibm.io.async.ResultHandler.runEventProcessingLoop(ResultHandler.java:775)
    at com.ibm.io.async.ResultHandler$2.run(ResultHandler.java:905)
    at com.ibm.ws.util.ThreadPool$Worker.run(ThreadPool.java:1814)

I am afraid that I may be missing something completely here and its not just the issue with soap.jar. Any help in pointing me to the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Apache SOAP support was removed from version 8.0 (soap.jar). Check this link Removed features .

You will need to migrate your web services.
You can check this page for manual migration - Migrating Apache SOAP web services to JAX-RPC web services based on Java EE standards .
Or you can check out WebSphere Application Server Migration Toolkit , which is a free plugin to Eclipse, which could automate some migration of your web services.