Our team is developing a Cocoon-based application that will
be deployed in the following environment:
J2EE Server: IBM WebSphere Application Server, 5.0.2
Build Number: ptf2M0325.01
Build Date: 06/23/2003
Operating system: IBM AIX 5L, Version 5.1.0.35
Hardware platform: IBM p690 32-way Regatta class MPP server
The installation of IBM's Fix Pack 2 for WebSphere Version 5.0
caused complete failure of our Cocoon application. The prior
version of our application was built on the binary distribution
of Cocoon 2.0.4 and worked flawlessly on multiple WebSphere 5.0
and Tomcat 4.1.24 J2EE servers running both on Windows 2000 and
IBM AIX 5L 5.1 platforms.
The upgrade to Fix Pack 2 for WebSphere 5.0 on AIX completely
broke our application. This Fix Pack introduced new levels of
Xalan and Xerces in the base WebSphere components, and we
spent a lot of fruitless effort trying to ensure Cocoon 2.0.4
was using its own versions of these two .jar files. This was
chasing a ghost. We built a Cocoon .xsp to actually
interrogate the Xalan and Xerces levels and found them to be
correct for the Cocoon 2.0.4 distribution.
There were the following consistent failure symptoms.
HTTP error 408 Connection timed out
Fatal XSLT transformation failure
Servlet.Engine.Transports :
1/TraxErrorHandler: java.lang.NullPointerException
javax.xml.transform.TransformerException:
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.apache.xalan.transformer.TransformerImpl.
transformNode(TransformerImpl.java:1226)
(not exactly sure if Bugzilla Bug 6156 applies or not)
Adjusting a multitude of Cocoon parameters and WebSphere
configuration parameters proved to be completely fruitless.
Every XSLT had the same failure symptoms. Every XSLT would
work correctly both in other J2EE servers on other platforms
and also in "stand-alone" test routines, such as XML Spy 5.4.
Consultation with the Cocoon web site gave some hints, and
the best one was "upgrade Xalan." This by itself was not
feasible in our development and deployment environments. So
we tried another approach.
We retrieved, built and deployed Cocoon 2.1 current as of
27 Aug 2003. We tested our current application at the same
build stage as the version that was deployed to, and
consistently failing on, WAS 5.0.2 on AIX 5L 5.1 All
tested functions performed correctly in the development
environment with Cocoon 2.1 A new .war file was installed
in AIX WAS 5.0.2 using Cocoon 2.1 as the foundation, and the
application once again performed without error.
Since we definitely were planning to go to Cocoon 2.1 at
some point in the near future, we simply jumped our timeline
to reach a desired environment more quickly than anticipated.
+-----------------------------------------+
+ +
+ Important configuration notes for +
+ Cocoon 2.0.4 and Cocoon 2.1 on +
+ WebSphere 5.0.x +
+ +
+-----------------------------------------+
(These have been reported previously, and
are recorded here for convenience.)
1. It is absolutely essential to set the
Classloader Mode to "PARENT_LAST" in two places:
(a) in the application definition general
properties and (b) web module general properties.
This allows WebSphere to use the Cocoon supplied
.jar files ahead of its own for the application.
The settings are necessary because of the different
levels of Xalan and Xerces involved.
2. The web.xml file for Cocoon 2.0.4 that we used
contains comments inside the
<init-param>
<param-name>load-class</param-name>
block. These comments must be removed in order to
install the application on all versions of WebSphere
we used. This situation did not apply to Cocoon 2.1
that we have deployed.
3. Even at the 5.0.2 version WebSphere still fails
to conform to the Servlet 2.3 specification. This
means the convenience of sitemap specifications like this
<map:match pattern="documents/index">
<map:redirect-to uri="index.html" />
do not work. For Cocoon 2.0.4 and Cocoon 2.1
the following does work
<map:match pattern="document/index">
<map:redirect-to uri="{request:contextPath}/documents/index.html"/>
These configuration notes were extracted from
http://archives.real-time.com/pipermail/cocoon-users/2003-July/036427.html
http://archives.real-time.com/pipermail/cocoon-users/2003-January/027972.html
http://weblog.gerhardfroehlich.net/archives/000011.html
(still active URLs as of 28 Aug 2003)
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