java.lang.LinkageError: "javax/activation/DataHandler" - grails

Question

So, I recently upgraded our Grails app from version 1.3.7 to 2.3.4. I'm now getting an exception in a SOAP handler that attempts to extract the message content and log it to the DB. This worked in 1.3.7, but I'm assuming that some new dependency or something has messed with the classpath.
The code looks like this:
private String extractSOAPMessage(SOAPMessageContext smc) {
Source source = smc.getMessage().getSOAPPart().getContent()
TransformerFactory factory = TransformerFactory.newInstance()
Transformer transformer = factory.newTransformer()
transformer.setOutputProperty( OutputKeys.METHOD, "xml" )
java.io.StringWriter writer = new StringWriter()
Result result = new StreamResult( writer )
transformer.transform( source, result )
return writer.toString()
}
The exception I'm seeing is:
Caused by: java.lang.LinkageError: loader constraint violation: loader (instance of <bootloader>) previously initiated loading for a different type with name "javax/activation/DataHandler"
It happens on this line:
Source source = smc.getMessage().getSOAPPart().getContent()
It looks like the culprit is the getSOAPart() call.
Note that I am using the 1.1.1 version of the cxf plugin for Grails. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. I've found several similar issues with solutions, but none of them have been for the "javax/activation/DataHandler", so I am not sure what's going on here.

Answer 1

I suspect something has a transitive dependency on the activation library which you need to exclude - try running a dependency-report. Since Java 6 that JAR has been un-necessary as it's built in to the core Java class library, but many things still have dependencies on it so they can work on Java 5 (or date back to when Java 5 was still in widespread use).