Upgrading BeanShell in Weblogic 6.x

Weblogic's app server 6.1+ comes bundled with version 1.01 of BeanShell. This causes two problems - first, it is seriously out of date and second it interferes with the ability to use BeanShell in your own apps.

If you wish to upgrade your Weblogic 6.1 to use the latest BeanShell and use it in your apps, grab a newer version of BeanShell (at least bsh-1.2b4.jar or greater) and place it in the server classpath prior to the weblogic.jar file. Note that including a newer BeanShell JAR inside your WAR or EAR file will not work, as the classpath gives priority to the system classpath. On a Unix system you can do this in the startWeblogic.sh command under the appropriate domain directory. For example, in the default configuration the file would be:

  [weblogic home]/wlserver6.1/config/mydomain/startWeblogic.sh

You can add the JAR to the path like this:

  BSH=/home/niemeyp/lib/bsh-1.2b4.jar
  #CLASSPATH=$WL_HOME:$WL_HOME/lib/weblogic_sp.jar:$WL_HOME/lib/weblogic.jar
  CLASSPATH=$BSH:$WL_HOME:$WL_HOME/lib/weblogic_sp.jar:$WL_HOME/lib/weblogic.jar