"Exception while loading the app" without a stack trace

Question

I'm migrating my app from GlassFish 3.0.1 to GlassFish 3.1.1. Deployment fails, with the following error messages:

SEVERE: Exception while loading the app
SEVERE: Exception while shutting down application container
SEVERE: Exception while shutting down application container : java.lang.NullPointerException
SEVERE: java.lang.RuntimeException: Error occurred during deployment: Exception while shutting down application container : java.lang.NullPointerException. Please see server.log for more details. 

There is no stack trace. I turned on the root logging level to FINEST, and the first SEVERE message occurs after a Weld message:

//...
FINE: WELD-000105 Enabled interceptor types for Manager
Enabled alternatives: [] []
Registered contexts: [interface javax.enterprise.context.SessionScoped, interface javax.enterprise.context.RequestScoped, interface javax.inject.Singleton, interface javax.enterprise.context.Dependent, interface javax.enterprise.context.ApplicationScoped, interface javax.enterprise.context.ConversationScoped]
Registered beans: 0
Specialized beans: 0
: []

And before several messages like these (for several different classes):

FINE: PWC4451: File cannot be read /opt/sun/glassfish-3.1.1/glassfish/domains/domain1/applications/QmsWeb/WEB-INF/classes/org/jboss/seam/transaction/SeamTransaction.class
FINE: PWC4451: File cannot be read /opt/sun/glassfish-3.1.1/glassfish/domains/domain1/applications/QmsWeb/WEB-INF/classes/org/jboss/seam/transaction/SeamTransaction.class
FINE: PWC4451: File cannot be read /opt/sun/glassfish-3.1.1/glassfish/domains/domain1/applications/QmsWeb/WEB-INF/classes/net/sf/ehcache/config/TerracottaConfiguration$ValueMode.class
//...

What could be causing this error? Could these PWC4451 messages be indicating that some libraries aren't being loaded?

Congenital

This looks like it's going nowhere. If any development tools programmer sees this, remember: good error messages are a feature! – Congenital

This is actually flagged as a Glassfish issue and should be fixed in Glassfish 4.0, accordong to the issue. See java.net/jira/browse/GLASSFISH-18599, unfortunately this helps neither you or me now. – Dorsman

Answer 1

This was due to a @ViewScoped bean that did not implement Serializable. Apparently, an older version of Weld that we were using didn't find it objectionable that a passivating-scoped bean wasn't Serializable, but this one failed silently because of it. Oh well, hope this saves someone some time.

Congenital

Answer 2

After three hours of debugging I fixed a problem like this trying to deploy the application in JBoss 6.

It seems like several error messages from Weld don't get logged properly under Glassfish. In my case I annotated an EJB with @Stateless @RequestScoped (that is illegal, must be @Statefull). With Glassfish I could only see that "error while loading the app", while in JBoss 6 I get the correct error message indicating the offending code.

I suggest that you try deploying on JBoss 6 stripping out all the parts (@Resource with specific JNDI path, for instance) that prevent the Weld deployer to scan the application and validate the CDI stuff.

Sewel

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll look into running my applications on JBoss. Do you know has this bug been reported to the Seam / GlassFish folks? – Congenital

Answer 3

In my case, the problem was that my beans.xml consisted of the empty "beans" element, which used to work but apparently doesn't anymore. It worked when I replaced it with a completely empty, 0-byte beans.xml.

Stiegler

This solved my problem! Thanks... would have taken a long time before i would tried that :) – Perrins

Answer 4

I had the same problem when adding an interceptor that wasn't serializable in Glassfish 3.1.2.2. Just got a NullPointerException without any further explanation.

It works fine when I made the interceptor implement Serializable.

Normanormal

Answer 5

Reason and solutions I have encountered regarding this problem:
- target not updated (make sure to do a maven clean, target folder might be locked, try to manually remove it and rebuild your ear (had this problem a few times)
- problem with JDBC pools: flush them
- constructor problem with EJB's (note it's the container who creates your beans): the container needs to be able to initiate them. So a default constructor with no arguments has to be present

if that doesn't work: team->compare to -> latest working version and consider every EJB bean or DTO for webservices as a possible cause of error. Comment your changes and retry to deploy to locate your problem.

In any way it's a nasty error :( Good luck!

Vilhelmina

Answer 6

In my case and in the spirit of Interceptors, mine was kind of easy to find because i was playing around there.

I adding the innocent @Interceptor on my interceptor even though i'm using it with annotations.

My version of glassfish is 3.1.2.2.

This page says that it is optional Inteceptor Javadoc.

Remontant