Spring-Boot Rest Controller on Payara 5 ignores JAXB annotations

I have a problem with Spring-Boot application that I want to deploy to Payara 5. I have visited Spring Initializr page, I've filled group, artifact, and added Web dependency. To make it possible to deploy application to Payara, I've removed dependencies to Tomcat, I've adjusted @SpringBootApplication annotated class, to extend SpringBootServletInitializer. And I've created very simple RestController that returns very simple Pojo.

Here is the code: pom.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project xmlns="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://maven.apache.org/POM/4.0.0 http://maven.apache.org/xsd/maven-4.0.0.xsd">
<modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion>
<parent>
    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>
    <version>2.1.1.RELEASE</version>
    <relativePath/> <!-- lookup parent from repository -->
</parent>
<groupId>com.sample</groupId>
<artifactId>rest-payara</artifactId>
<version>0.0.1-SNAPSHOT</version>
<name>rest-glassfish</name>
<description>Demo project for Spring Boot</description>
<packaging>war</packaging>

<properties>
    <java.version>1.8</java.version>
</properties>

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
    </dependency>

    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>
        <version>2.1.1.RELEASE</version>
        <exclusions>
            <exclusion>
                <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-tomcat</artifactId>
                <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            </exclusion>
        </exclusions>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-tomcat</artifactId>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <version>2.1.1.RELEASE</version>
        <scope>provided</scope>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>
        <version>2.1.1.RELEASE</version>
        <scope>test</scope>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-boot-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>
</project>

Application class:

package com.sample.restpayara;
import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.builder.SpringApplicationBuilder;
import org.springframework.boot.web.servlet.support.SpringBootServletInitializer;

@SpringBootApplication
public class RestPayaraApplication extends SpringBootServletInitializer {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(RestPayaraApplication.class, args);
    }

    @Override
    protected SpringApplicationBuilder configure(SpringApplicationBuilder application) {
        return application.sources(RestPayaraApplication.class);
    }
}

Rest controller:

package com.sample.restpayara;

import org.springframework.http.MediaType;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.GetMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RestController;

@RestController
public class RestApiController {

  @GetMapping(value = "/sample-pojo", produces = { MediaType.APPLICATION_JSON_VALUE, MediaType.APPLICATION_XML_VALUE })
  public SamplePojo getSamplePojo() {
    return new SamplePojo("Sample pojo");
  }
}

Pojo:

package com.sample.restpayara;

import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlElement;
import javax.xml.bind.annotation.XmlRootElement;

@XmlRootElement(name = "PojoRoot")
public class SamplePojo {

  @XmlElement(name = "pojoContent")
  private String content;

  public SamplePojo() {
  }

  public SamplePojo(String content) {
    this.content = content;
  }

  public String getContent() {
    return content;
  }
}

When I run this application with

mvn spring-boot:run

Everything works like I want, CURL request:

curl -k -i -X GET "http://localhost:8080/sample-pojo" -H "accept: application/xml" -H "Content-Type: application/xml"

Returns:

HTTP/1.1 200 
Content-Type: application/xml
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Fri, 28 Dec 2018 09:26:08 GMT

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><PojoRoot><pojoContent>Sample pojo</pojoContent></PojoRoot>

However when I deploy this code to Payara and I do CURL request:

curl -k -i -X GET "https://my-payara-domain.local:8181/rest-payara-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT/sample-pojo" -H "accept: application/xml" -H "Content-Type: application/xml"

i receive response:

HTTP/2 200 
content-type: application/xml;charset=UTF-8

<SamplePojo><content>Sample pojo</content></SamplePojo>

And here is the problem - why are JAXB annotations ignored on Payara and what do I have to do to make them work?

Solution

For anyone ever fighting with similar problem - the root cause of the issue was related to the fact, that MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter was kicking in on Payara 5, while Jaxb2RootElementHttpMessageConverter was not there. I found a solution for my problem by providing a configuration:

package com.sample.restpayara;

import java.util.List;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.http.converter.HttpMessageConverter;
import org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter;
import org.springframework.http.converter.xml.Jaxb2RootElementHttpMessageConverter;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.config.annotation.WebMvcConfigurationSupport;

@Configuration
public class JaxbSupportConfiguration extends WebMvcConfigurationSupport {

  @Override
  public void configureMessageConverters(List<HttpMessageConverter<?>> converters) {
    converters.add(new Jaxb2RootElementHttpMessageConverter());
    converters.add(new MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter());
  }
}

Hope it helps someone in the future, for me it took 1,5 day to figure it out ;(

=================================

UPDATE: First solution did turn on Web MVC and caused static files not to be served anymore. I've managed to find a final solution by providing configuration:

package com.sample.restpayara;

import java.util.Arrays;
import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.http.HttpMessageConverters;
import org.springframework.boot.builder.SpringApplicationBuilder;
import org.springframework.boot.web.servlet.support.SpringBootServletInitializer;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.http.converter.json.MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter;
import org.springframework.http.converter.xml.Jaxb2RootElementHttpMessageConverter;

@SpringBootApplication
public class RestPayaraApplication extends SpringBootServletInitializer {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SpringApplication.run(RestPayaraApplication.class, args);
    }

    @Override
    protected SpringApplicationBuilder configure(SpringApplicationBuilder application) {
        return application.sources(RestPayaraApplication.class);
    }

    @Bean
    public HttpMessageConverters converters() {
        return new HttpMessageConverters(true, Arrays.asList(
                new MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter(),
                new Jaxb2RootElementHttpMessageConverter())
        );
    }
}