Here's a redacted version of the error message seen during deployment...
Error
Failed to execute goal com.oracle.weblogic:weblogic-maven-plugin:12.2.1-3-0:deploy (wls-deploy) on project zzzz: weblogic.Deployer$DeployerException: weblogic.deploy.api.tools.deployer.DeployerException: Task 75 failed: [Deployer:149026]deploy application zzzz on zzzz.
Target state: deploy failed on Server zzzz
java.util.ServiceConfigurationError: javax.xml.stream.XMLInputFactory: Provider com.ctc.wstx.stax.WstxInputFactory not a subtype
at weblogic.Deployer.run(Deployer.java:76)
at weblogic.Deployer.mainWithExceptions(Deployer.java:63)
at weblogic.tools.maven.plugins.deploy.DeployMojo.execute(DeployMojo.java:342)
...
at org.codehaus.plexus.classworlds.launcher.Launcher.main(Launcher.java:356)
Turned out the issue was to do with class loading and specifically what weblogic.xml contained. Because these services were using Oracle Coherence from WebLogic 12.1 they were providing a tangosol-coherence-override.xml file as part of the WAR package. This required the prefer-web-inf-classes element in weblogic.xml to be set to true. This caused the StAX exception to be thrown.
Setting prefer-web-inf-classes to false resolved the issue...
weblogic.xml
<container-descriptor>
<prefer-web-inf-classes>false</prefer-web-inf-classes>
</container-descriptor>
So either something in the WLS class loader structure changed between 12.1 and 12.2 or some other dependencies changed, I've not tried to track it down too hard. What about Coherence and the override file? Well it looks like due to these changes in WLS 12.2 that certain services are not able to make use of this feature any more. I'll have a separate article on that and a couple of workarounds to deal with it too.
-i
