I have an ear file with a web module and a ejb module(just used for message driven beans). The ejb module has dependency on web module and it's classes. I would need to load the web module first and then ejb module. But the liberty always loading the ejb module first causing com.ibm.ws.container.service.state.StateChangeException: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError:
How to control the order of modules loading within the same ear file? On traditional webshpere there is an option called 'Starting weight'. Whichever module has lowest value takes precedence and loads it first. so the application works good on tradition Websphere. However, this property seems missing on Liberty. I already looked at this. It only talks about deploying the multiple war files and their order.
If your EJB module depends on Web, that is bad design. It should be the other way around.
If you have such situation , proper way would be to extract shared classes in to a common jar file, let say mycommon.jar and then put that into ear\lib folder. In this way they will be visible by both modules ejb and web.
If your EJB module depends on the javax web api (e.g. servletRequest) that is even worse, and you should redesign such classes to POJO DTOs.
As a last resort you could try what is described here and add <initialize-in-order>true</initialize-in-order> in your application.xml.
FRowe's solution will not work, as classes are not shared between the applications, so changing load order of apps will not help. Each Java™ EE application has its own class loader in a running Liberty server.