Compatibility Issues

In the next major release of the Sun Java System Application Server Enterprise Edition the following incompatibilities will be introduced:

• While the HTTP Service will continue using a DNS cache for better performance, monitoring of the DNS cache will not be available.

• The support for HTTP file caching will be revamped, resulting in changes to configuration and monitoring.

• The format for the access log rotation suffix will be changed to the format supported by date and time objects as specified in http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/text/SimpleDateFormat.html. The default value in this release, “%YYYY;%MM;%DD;-%hh;h%mm;m%ss;s,” will continue to be supported but no other variations will be supported.

• Any domain.xml elements, attributes and properties no longer supported will be flagged as warnings in the server log and in the upgrade log file as having been deprecated.

• The server.http-service.dns node will no longer be available in the monitoring view.

• Some of the attributes from the server.http-service.file-cache node may be removed. Consequently, any asadmin monitoring command trying to access removed attributes from these nodes will fail.

Deploytool

Deploytool will no longer be available. The equivalent functionality is available in the NetBeans IDE. For more information and to plan a migration, please see J2EE 1.4 tutorial for NetBeans 4.1 at http://www.netbeans.org/kb/.

Verifier

• Verifier GUI mode (invoked by verifier -u) will no longer be available. The equivalent functionality will be available in the NetBeans IDE.

• The default mode for application verification when using verifier tool will change from “Verify J2EE rules” to “Verify J2EE rules and Sun Application Server Configuration Rules.” In other words, by default verifier will test whether an application meets J2EE rules and is configured to run on Sun Application Server. The verifier command will have a command-line switch to test an application for J2EE rules only.

Classloader Changes

In the current release, the JAR and directory entries added to classpath-prefix, server-classpath, and classpath-suffix attributes of domain.xml (application server configuration file) are available in the JVM system classpath. An application depending on this behavior might be using the following methods from the class java.lang.ClassLoader to access classes or other resources from JVM system classpath:

• getSystemClassLoader()

• getSystemResource()

• getSystemResourceAsStream()

• getSystemResources

In the next major release, the JAR and directory entries added to classpath-prefix, server-classpath, and classpath-suffix will no longer be available in the JVM system classpath. If an application uses one of the methods mentioned above, Sun strongly recommends using an equivalent method that does not assume that the resources are available in the system classpath. The equivalent methods that do not rely on the JVM system classpath are available in java.lang.ClassLoader and should be used when possible; for example:

Example 2–1 Old Code

java.net.URL url = ClassLoader.getSystemResource
("com/acme/tools/tools.properties");

Example 2–2 Suggested Change

java.net.URL url = this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResource
("com/acme/tools/tools.properties");

If it is not possible to change the code, then you may choose to use a new configuration option that will be added in the next release to set JVM system classpath.

Web Service Security Configuration

Security for Web services can be configured using the files wss-client-config.xml and wss-server-config.xml. Please note that the content and names of these configuration files are unstable and likely to change. The equivalent functionality will continue to be available.