Reduce the EAR file size by trimming the WEB-INF\LIB folder jars

In my previous blog I said of removing the jar files basically from the APP-INF\lib.

But most of us want to remove the JAR files from the WEB-INF\LIB folder also just in case to truncate the EAR to the maximum possible extent.

How many of us will and have hindered this exception as "the path of the URI is wrong or no reference to the TLD" etc., etc.,

When you google it the best way is to add up the jar files like struts.jar into the WEB-INF\LIB and deploy the app and you are safe.

doing this actually increase the size of the ear and it does not really solve our problem at hand.

did not help a lot and I understood that many people have this problem at hand and there was no definitive answer.

here is a way to get rid of this also. Again this I tried in weblogic and there should be a way to accomplish this with other application servers too.

Here are the steps to perform this reduction.

Copy all the necessary TLD of the COTS jar files into a location in your workspace say WEB-INF\tld
Change the web.xml to have the references to the TLD files

http://java.sun.com/jsp/jstl/core
/WEB-INF/tld/c.tld

By default you can remove these jar files from the WEB-INF\LIB folder.
Ensure that you have deployed these JAR files as LIBRARY into the application server
Generate the EAR file and you should see happy smiles on the deployer.

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JS and CSS compression

Most of the web sites need to do this to ensure that the application performs much better in terms of performance.

I have an ANT task which will do this in a much better way. Here are the steps for the same.

Download the jar file named YuiCompressorTask (originally from Yahoo) from the web site YUI Compressor

Place this jar file in the location <ant_home>\lib

Create ANT task as follows

Change the locations according to your needs.

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Weblogic server startup known errors and resolving

Mostly when we re-start Admin Server or managed servers you will be getting the following errors. These are very famous noted from the server logs

weblogic.management.ManagementException: 
            Unable to obtain lock on "Domain Path/servers/domainname/tmp/something.lok."
            Server may already be running

Remedy action

Go to this folder, rename the .lok file to .kol

Re-start the server again, You SHOULD see the following error

Could not obtain an exclusive lock for directory: 
            "Domain Path/servers/domainname/data/ldap/ldapfiles" 
            Waiting for 10 seconds and then retrying in case existing WebLogic Server is still shutting down

Remedy action

Go to this folder

rename the EmbeddedLDAP.lok to EmbeddedLDAP.kol

Re-start the servers again and YOU SHOULD SEE that the weblogic servers start correctly.

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