Adobe Flex in Weblogic with BlazeDS & EJB3

In a earlier post I already made Adobe Flex / BlazeDS / EJB2.1 example and this example was deployed on an OC4J J2EE container. In this post I let the same example run in Oracle Weblogic 10.3.2 ( FMW11g) with the BlazeDS jars as a shared library ( this also works with Adobe Lifecycle). Also in the earlier post I needed to use EJB2.1 but with EJB factory of Peter Martin I can use Eclipselink.
To start, we need to download BlazeDS and EJB and Flex Integration jar, Extract these archives so we can copy the jar files to a new location.

We need to make a shared library for weblogic. This is better then just add all the jars to WEB-INF/lib folder of every web application. You can patch the blazeds jars without re-deploying your webapps and you now know exactly which version of blazeds you are using.
Make a folder called blazeds with as subfolders APP-INF and META-INF and add a empty zip in it and call it empty.jar

Copy the blazeds and ejb factory jars in the APP-INF/lib folder

In the META-INF folder we need to add two files application.xml and MANIFEST.MF where we will add the library information for weblogic.

The application.xml

<?xml version = '1.0' encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<application xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         version="1.4">
<description>BlazeDS Library</description>         
<display-name>blazeds</display-name>
<module>
<java>empty.jar</java>
</module>
</application>

The MANIFEST.MF has this content
Manifest-Version: 1.0
Ant-Version: Apache Ant 1.7.0RC1
Created-By: 14.0-b16 (Sun Microsystems Inc.)
Extension-Name: blazeds
Specification-Version: 3.2
Implementation-Title: BlazeDS - BlazeDS Application
Implementation-Version: 3.2.0.3978
Implementation-Vendor: Adobe Systems Inc.


We are ready to add this library to the Weblogic Server. The library folder is on the same file system as the weblogic server so I don't need to make an EAR file, I can just use the exploded folder. Open the Weblogic Console and go to Deployments. Here we can install a new Deployment.

Go to blazeds library folder
Install it as a libray

Weblogic will detect the manifest and application.xml and press Finish


In the deployment page we can see the blazeds library.
In the ViewController project we need to make a reference to this shared libray, to do this add a weblogic deployment descriptor. We can use weblogic-application.xml located in the META-INF folder of the EAR or use weblogic.xml in the WEB-INF of the Viewcontroller project. Here is an example of my weblogic-application.xml

<?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'windows-1252'?>
<weblogic-application xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
                     xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/weblogic-application http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/weblogic-application/1.0/weblogic-application.xsd"
                     xmlns="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/weblogic-application">
 <library-ref>
   <library-name>blazeds</library-name>
 </library-ref>
</weblogic-application>

The last steps is to configure the web.xml for blazeds and the blazeds configuration files for the EJB call.
first the web.xml of the viewcontroller project.

<?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'windows-1252'?>
<web-app xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_2_5.xsd"
        version="2.5" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee">
   <description>Empty web.xml file for Web Application</description>

   <servlet>
       <servlet-name>MessageBrokerServlet</servlet-name>
       <servlet-class>flex.messaging.MessageBrokerServlet</servlet-class>
       <init-param>
           <param-name>services.configuration.file</param-name>
           <param-value>/WEB-INF/flex/services-config.xml</param-value>
      </init-param>
       <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
   </servlet>
  
   <servlet-mapping>
       <servlet-name>MessageBrokerServlet</servlet-name>
       <url-pattern>/messagebroker/*</url-pattern>
   </servlet-mapping>
  
   <listener>
       <listener-class>flex.messaging.HttpFlexSession</listener-class>
   </listener>
  
  
   <mime-mapping>
       <extension>html</extension>
       <mime-type>text/html</mime-type>
   </mime-mapping>
   <mime-mapping>
       <extension>txt</extension>
       <mime-type>text/plain</mime-type>
   </mime-mapping>
</web-app>

I use the remoting-config.xml and services-config.xml files both located in WEB-INF/flex folder
Here is my remoting-config.xml file, where source element is the JNDI name of my EJB Session Bean, after deployed of your model you can look it up in the Weblogic console ( servers, select the server and in the top there is a link to the jndi page )

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<service id="remoting-service" class="flex.messaging.services.RemotingService">
   <adapters>
       <adapter-definition id="java-object"
                           class="flex.messaging.services.remoting.adapters.JavaAdapter"
                           default="true"/>
   </adapters>
   <default-channels>
       <channel ref="my-amf"/>
   </default-channels>
   <destination id="EmployeeEJB">
       <properties>
           <factory>ejb3</factory>
           <source>flex_ejb2-Model-HRSessionEJB#nl.whitehorses.model.services.HRSessionEJB</source>
       </properties>
   </destination>
</service>

my services-config.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<services-config>
   <services>
       <service-include file-path="remoting-config.xml"/>
       <default-channels>
           <channel ref="my-amf"/>
       </default-channels>
   </services>
   <factories>
       <factory id="ejb3" class="com.adobe.ac.ejb.EJB3Factory"/>
   </factories>
   <channels>
       <channel-definition id="my-amf"
                           class="mx.messaging.channels.AMFChannel">
           <endpoint url="http://{server.name}:{server.port}/{context.root}/messagebroker/amf"
                     class="flex.messaging.endpoints.AMFEndpoint"/>
           <properties>
               <polling-enabled>false</polling-enabled>
           </properties>
       </channel-definition>
   </channels>
   <logging>
       <target class="flex.messaging.log.ConsoleTarget" level="Error">
           <properties>
               <prefix>[Flex]</prefix>
               <includeDate>false</includeDate>
               <includeTime>false</includeTime>
               <includeLevel>false</includeLevel>
               <includeCategory>false</includeCategory>
           </properties>
       </target>
   </logging>
</services-config>

Deploy everything to the Weblogic server.
and at last the Adobe mxml where I call the getEmployeesFindAll method.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" width="1155" height="206.21213">
 <mx:applicationComplete>srv.getEmployeesFindAll()</mx:applicationComplete>

 <mx:RemoteObject id="srv" showBusyCursor="true" destination="EmployeeEJB"/>
 <mx:DataGrid width="1104.6212" dataProvider="{srv.getEmployeesFindAll.lastResult}"  height="140.98485"/>
 
</mx:Application>