I have been working on OC4J & TomCat for quite sometime & WebLogic was always a mystery. A piecie of the puzzle was the folder APP-INF that I used to find in may WAR & EAR Files.
I initially assumed that APP-INF was a J2EE standard - however, I was proved to be incorrect in a few minutes of Googling. APP-INF is not a J2EE standard, but rather a BEA extension to the standard.
The solution in OC4J is to rewire the classloasing using orion-application.xml :-
library path="../../applications/earname/APP-INF/classes"
Thankfully, I was working with the latest OC4J 10.1.3.1.0 & it's Enterprise Manager offers a "Configure Classloading" option at the last step of application deployment. I lazily used this option instead of tweaking the orion-application.xml
Thanks to Olaf Heimburger for enlightening me ! :-
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=1590796
http://blogs.oracle.com/olaf/2006/12/12#a65
