maven - Why do I get a NoSuchMethodError on JodaTime.withYear()?

Question

I have a maven web app project, where I use JodaTime. JodaTime is not directly referenced in my maven project, but is a part of a transitive dependency. In other words, my web app war, has another project of mine as a direct dependency, and that jar contains JodaTime.

I am getting an error after executing these two lines. It compiles fine though.

DateTime firstDate = new DateTime();
firstDate = firstDate.withYear(2016);

And here is my error:

java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: org.joda.time.DateTime.withYear(I)Lorg/joda/time/DateTime;

I know that these kinds of errors can happen if I compile and run with different versions of a library, like this answer says, but the withYear() has been around since JodaTime 1.3, since 2006, and I can't see that I could ever have imported a version that old. I've even checked my final war-file, and the only JodaTime library present, is 2.9.2.

The two lines runs fine if I create a main-method snippet, and run it from within the same project in eclipse. They only fail upon compilation into a war file, and running from my weblogic 10.3.2 server.

Does anyone have any idea on how I can proceed to debug this one?

Answer 1

WebLogic 10.3.6 includes this on the classpath:

joda.time_1.2.1.0.jar

This is earlier than the 1.3 that has the missing method.

Your code compiles, which is a good indication that your app's classpath has at least Joda 1.3.

Thus I suspect this is a WebLogic classpath issue. When your app uses libraries that are also on the WebLogic classpath, you need to tell WebLogic which library to use. You do this with the prefer-application-packages element in src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/weblogic.xml.

<weblogic-web-app xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/weblogic/weblogic-web-app"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://xmlns.oracle.com/weblogic/weblogic-web-app
http://xmlns.oracle.com/weblogic/weblogic-web-app/1.3/weblogic-web-app.xsd">

  <context-root>myApp</context-root>
  <container-descriptor>
    <prefer-application-packages>
      <package-name>org.joda.time.*</package-name>
      <package-name>org.slf4j.*</package-name>
      <package-name>org.slf4j.impl.*</package-name>
      <package-name>org.slf4j.spi.*</package-name>
      <!-- others here -->
    </prefer-application-packages>
  </container-descriptor>

  <!-- rest of weblogic.xml here -->
</weblogic-web-app>

WebLogic has a classpath analysis tool called wls-cat to help locate these conflicts, described in this blog post. One caveat - do not just copy wls-cat's prefer-application-packages block into your webapp and think you're done - you need to resolve each conflict one by one. Sometimes that means excluding dependencies from your webapp or using scope provided.