Hack to deploy JAX-WS 2.0 webservice on Websphere 6.1

Our team had developed a webservice using JAX-WS 2.0 and using the Reference implementation of Sun as the JAX-WS provider. The application was developed using Netbeans and the embedded Tomcat server.

But when the application was deployed on WAS 6.1, then it failed and resulted in ClassCast exceptions. The base installation of WAS 6.1 only supports JAX-RPC 1.1.
IBM did provide an option - installing the webservices feature pack for WAS 6.1
The installation was a bit of a pain, especially on a cluster. You essentially had to create new AppServer profiles, create a new cluster and move all applications to the new cluster. This would also required considerable downtime on a live production server.

I looked for an other option. I tried to understand what was happening under the hoods when Netbeans was creating a webservice. It was clear that the webservice created was using a Servlet provided by the RI of JAX-WS 2.0. Even all the annotations and JAXB libraries were included in the lib directory. Hence there was no dependancy on any server-specific library as such.

I realised that the ClassCast exceptions on WAS 6.1 were happening due to the ClassLoader heirarchy - which was set to 'Parent First'. I decided to try to change this configuration to 'Child First' - so that JAX-WS RI libraries are picked up from WEB-INF/lib first.

There were 2 changes that I made using the web admin console. Go to "Enterprise Applications --> {Application name} --> Class Loader" and changed the following items:
Select "Classes loaded with application class loader first" and "Single class loader for application". Save these changes to the master configuration and restart the AppServer.

This hack worked and we could deploy JAX-WS 2.0 webservices on WAS 6.1 :)

Tip: We ran into a few Linkage errors, which we could resolve by removing all duplicate jar files.
A linkage error would typically occur when a class tries to call another class loaded by a different class loader.