I had a similar issue deploying a SLSB as webservice and recognized, that my ear has a lot of jars (including saaj) in the lib directory.

After clean up the ears lib to include only my application jars, the ClassNotFoundException isn't thrown anymore!

Maybe this is a hint for solving your problem.

Kind regards

Willi

I solved the same error with

<dependency>

    <groupId>com.sun.xml.parsers</groupId>

    <artifactId>jaxp-ri</artifactId>

    <version>1.4.5</version>

    <scope>runtime</scope>

</dependency>

if it matters, the other libs I had were

<dependency>

    <groupId>org.springframework.ws</groupId>

    <artifactId>spring-ws</artifactId>

    <version>2.1.0.RELEASE</version>

    <classifier>all</classifier>

</dependency>

<dependency>

    <groupId>com.sun.xml.messaging.saaj</groupId>

    <artifactId>saaj-impl</artifactId>

    <version>1.3.20</version>

    <scope>runtime</scope>

</dependency>

I resolve the same issue! i'm using gradle1.5 and Java 7, Jboss 6.0, Spring 3.2.

I add to project:

    compile group: 'com.sun.xml.messaging.saaj', name: 'saaj-impl', version: '1.3.2'

    compile group: 'javax.activation', name: 'activation', version: '1.1.1'

    compile group: 'com.sun.xml.parsers', name: 'jaxp-ri', version: '1.4.5'