Chris Harcourt

I’ve been working on a project using Spring WS recently. During development I run/test webapps using the Maven Jetty plugin. All was well, everythings works as expected, and I was at a stage where I needed to deploy on a Tomcat 6 server for some larger scale testing. In the past I have had no issues moving from Jetty to Tomcat so, possibly foolishly, I was not expecting any this time…

After deploying to Tomcat the web frontend worked fine, but the web services did not. A quick look at the logs revealed lots of exceptions relating to SAAJ. The top of the stacktraces were:

org.springframework.ws.soap.saaj.SaajSoapMessageException: Could not write message to OutputStream: Error during saving a multipart message; nested exception is com.sun.xml.internal.messaging.saaj.SOAPExceptionImpl: Error during saving a multipart message
at org.springframework.ws.soap.saaj.SaajSoapMessage.writeTo(SaajSoapMessage.java:122)
...
Caused by: com.sun.xml.internal.messaging.saaj.SOAPExceptionImpl: Error during saving a multipart message
at com.sun.xml.internal.messaging.saaj.soap.MessageImpl.saveChanges(MessageImpl.java:1126)
at org.springframework.ws.soap.saaj.Saaj13Implementation.writeTo(Saaj13Implementation.java:264)
at org.springframework.ws.soap.saaj.SaajSoapMessage.writeTo(SaajSoapMessage.java:118)
...
Caused by: com.sun.xml.internal.messaging.saaj.SOAPExceptionImpl: Unable to get header stream in saveChanges:
at com.sun.xml.internal.messaging.saaj.soap.MessageImpl.saveChanges(MessageImpl.java:1103)
...
Caused by: java.io.IOException
at com.sun.xml.internal.messaging.saaj.soap.impl.EnvelopeImpl.output(EnvelopeImpl.java:298)


I’m running on Java 6, which contains it’s own SAAJ implementation, so I was fairly sure it wasn’t a problem with the libraries in the application itself. So, I hit google for a couple of hours in hope of finding a solution. I didn’t find anything which mentioned this issue specifically, but the gist I was getting pointed towards a problem with the XML parser.

In desperation I tried including various bits of Xerces in the application’s WAR (I know Java 6 has a built in parser, but I figured it was worth a try). This didn’t work, and in fact caused even more errors. This problem was really starting to annoy me…

It occurred to me that it could be something about the configuration of the server which runs Tomcat. If it all works fine on my workstation it must be the server, right? So I put pulled down a copy of the project onto the server and ran it using the Maven Jetty plugin. Lo and behold, it worked flawlessly. Maybe it’s a Tomcat issue then? To verify this I installed Tomcat on my workstation and ran the app there. Same problem - it muct be Tomcat then. OK, time to hit google again.

…many frustrating hours pass…

Eventually I found a page which mentioned errors simmilar to mine, so I tried it’s solution… and … thank the Lord - it works! What was this magical solution? Putting a copy of Xerces and Xalan in the Tomcat’s ‘endorsed’ lib directory. Annoyingly simple. Why does this work? I’m not certain, but apparently the versions of Xerces and Xalan which Tomcat ships with don’t play well with the SAAJ implementation in Java 6 (this might well be wrong…). The important thing is it fixed the problem.

For reference (in case this problem appears for anyone else) I am using: Java 1.6.0_06, Tomcat 6.0.16, Spring 2.5.4 and Spring WS 1.5.2. The jars I put in %TomcatHome%/common/endorsed to fix the problem were xalan-2.7.0 and xercesImpl-2.8.1.

I am now back to development nirvana - balance has been restored.

Since I upgraded my living situation a few weeks ago (moved into a new house share with 2 friends) I’ve been without an internet connection. We ended up having to wait 2 weeks for BT to “install” our phone line (in quotes since it was physically already there), then around 10 days for the ISP to active the ADSL. Being without an internet connection at home feels really weird. Even more so since we don’t have TV either, which meant we were rather cut off from the world (hope I didn’t miss anything important).

Anyway, yesterday the ADSL started working (2 days early actually). Happy times… kind of.

We’re on an 8Mbit service, but I’m struggling to get more than around 70KB/sec for downloads. This is, as you can probably imagine, is a bit of the step back from the 700KB/sec or more that I’ve been accustomed to. Just now I needed to grab a copy of Spring-WS - 25MB - it took almost 7 minutes! Sigh…

I’m assuming the problem is the length of the line from the house to the exchange (very roughly about 3 miles) combined with less than amazing in-house wiring. Initially the router was connecting at only 800Kbps! You don’t expect to get all of the bandwidth they claim, but a tenth it just ridiculous.

Switching the rather crappy looking micro filter which was left by the previous occupants for the decent one I’ve used before got that up to 2200Kbps. However, the actual speed of connection didn’t change much. I’m putting this down the (according to what I can work out) horrendous attenuation and noise margin (59dB/6dB if you’re interested). I’ve yet to really dig into the things that can be done about this (hey, I’m busy), but I’m hoping I can improved the situation a bit.

Ah well, at least we’re online now

After putting off upgrades on omicron for ages (I was busy), this week I finally found the time. So, I’m now running:

• Apache 2.2.8
• Tomcat 6.0.16
• MySQL 5.0.54
• Subversion 1.4.6

Woo yeah for them all running smoothly! I was especially happy that converting my Tomcat 5.5 configuration to 6.0 was easy.

As a bonus upgrade, I’ve switched the theme on my blog. White on black was starting to annoy me, so this time it’s black on white. Mmmmm - minimalist.

An article in my RSS reader caught my eye today. elharo writes:

The Internet is 30 today. Exactly 30 years ago today on November 22, 1977 the first three networks were connected to become the Internet

Think how far we’ve come…