Fixing Classloader Conflicts in Railo on JBoss

If you’ve been working with Railo on JBoss, I’m sure you’d have run into an issue where the class loader throws error when the JBoss instance is started. These errors are caused due to conflicts between classes that are being loaded up by different applications in the JBoss server instance.

Some have suggested removing a few jar files from the Railo lib folder to get around this issue. Some others have suggested putting all the Railo jar files in the server/servername/lib folder instead of the usual server/servername/railo.war/lib folder. While both approaches work in that Railo starts up without any errors, but both are a ways to get around the problem rather than actually addressing it.

The correct way to fix this issue is to make JBoss isloate classes loaded for different applications, thereby removing the possibiiity of conflicts. On JBoss 5 you can do this if you add a file in WEB-INF/jboss-classloading.xml that contains:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<classloading xmlns="urn:jboss:classloading:1.0"
name="mywar.war"
domain="DefaultDomain"
export-all="NON_EMPTY"
             import-all="true">
</classloading>

This defines how an application’s classloader is setup and how the classes loaded for an application are share with other applications in the JBoss instance.

After you add this file into railo.war/WEB-INF, restart the server with all the jars that ship with Railo, and all classes should load up without any issue.

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