Spring Application context not found

Question

I'm having an issue with reading the application context of my application. I'm doing experiments with Vaadin . My configuration class, which is annotated in a way I've used before in other projects and always works is annotated with:

@ImportResource("classpath:applicationContext.xml")

What makes this so odd is that no matter what I do, even using it to explicitly find the file, for example:

@ImportResource("/tmp/classpath:applicationContext.xml")

It still does not work! I'm using Spring 3 at the moment (for historical reasons...)

2016/05/17 13:39 ContextLoader.initWebApplicationContext:319 - Context initialization failed java.lang.IllegalArgumentException at org.springframework.asm.ClassReader.(Unknown Source) at org.springframework.asm.ClassReader.(Unknown Source) at org.springframework.asm.ClassReader.(Unknown Source) at org.springframework.core.type.classreading.SimpleMetadataReader.(SimpleMetadataReader.java:52) at org.springframework.core.type.classreading.SimpleMetadataReaderFactory.getMetadataReader(SimpleMetadataReaderFactory.java:80) at org.springframework.core.type.classreading.CachingMetadataReaderFactory.getMetadataReader(CachingMetadataReaderFactory.java:102) at org.springframework.core.type.classreading.SimpleMetadataReaderFactory.getMetadataReader(SimpleMetadataReaderFactory.java:76) at org.springframework.context.annotation.ConfigurationClassUtils.checkConfigurationClassCandidate(ConfigurationClassUtils.java:70) at org.springframework.context.annotation.ConfigurationClassPostProcessor.processCon figBeanDefinitions(ConfigurationClassPostProcessor.java:253) at org.springframework.context.annotation.ConfigurationClassPostProcessor.postProcessBeanDefinitionRegistry(ConfigurationClassPostProcessor.java:223) at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.invokeBeanFactoryPostProcessors(AbstractApplicationContext.java:630) at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.refresh(AbstractApplicationContext.java:461) at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader.configureAndRefreshWebApplicationContext(ContextLoader.java:389) at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader.initWebApplicationContext(ContextLoader.java:294) at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener.contextInitialized(ContextLoaderListener.java:112) at org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.ContextHandler.callContextInitialized(ContextHandler.java:782) at org.eclipse.jetty.servlet.ServletContextHandler.callContextInitialized(ServletContextHandler.java:424) at org.eclipse.je tty.server.handler.ContextHandler.startContext(ContextHandler.java:774) at org.eclipse.jetty.servlet.ServletContextHandler.startContext(ServletContextHandler.java:249) at org.eclipse.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext.startContext(WebAppContext.java:1242) at org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.ContextHandler.doStart(ContextHandler.java:717) at org.eclipse.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext.doStart(WebAppContext.java:494) at org.mortbay.jetty.plugin.JettyWebAppContext.doStart(JettyWebAppContext.java:298) at org.eclipse.jetty.util.component.AbstractLifeCycle.start(AbstractLifeCycle.java:64) at org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.HandlerCollection.doStart(HandlerCollection.java:229) at org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.ContextHandlerCollection.doStart(ContextHandlerCollection.java:172) at org.eclipse.jetty.util.component.AbstractLifeCycle.start(AbstractLifeCycle.java:64) at org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.HandlerCollection.doStart(HandlerCollection.java:229) at org.eclipse.jetty.util.component.AbstractLifeCycl e.start(AbstractLifeCycle.java:64) at org.eclipse.jetty.server.handler.HandlerWrapper.doStart(HandlerWrapper.java:95) at org.eclipse.jetty.server.Server.doStart(Server.java:282) at org.mortbay.jetty.plugin.JettyServer.doStart(JettyServer.java:65) at org.eclipse.jetty.util.component.AbstractLifeCycle.start(AbstractLifeCycle.java:64) at org.mortbay.jetty.plugin.AbstractJettyMojo.startJetty(AbstractJettyMojo.java:520) at org.mortbay.jetty.plugin.AbstractJettyMojo.execute(AbstractJettyMojo.java:365) at org.mortbay.jetty.plugin.JettyRunMojo.execute(JettyRunMojo.java:523) at org.apache.maven.plugin.DefaultBuildPluginManager.executeMojo(DefaultBuildPluginManager.java:134) at org.apache.maven.lifecycle.internal.MojoExecutor.execute(MojoExecutor.java:207) at org.apache.maven.lifecycle.internal.MojoExecutor.execute(MojoExecutor.java:153) at org.apache.maven.lifecycle.internal.MojoExecutor.execute(MojoExecutor.java:145) at org.apache.maven.lifecycle.internal.LifecycleModuleBuilder.buildProject(Li fecycleModuleBuilder.java:116) at org.apache.maven.lifecycle.internal.LifecycleModuleBuilder.buildProject(LifecycleModuleBuilder.java:80) at org.apache.maven.lifecycle.internal.builder.singlethreaded.SingleThreadedBuilder.build(SingleThreadedBuilder.java:51) at org.apache.maven.lifecycle.internal.LifecycleStarter.execute(LifecycleStarter.java:128) at org.apache.maven.DefaultMaven.doExecute(DefaultMaven.java:307) at org.apache.maven.DefaultMaven.doExecute(DefaultMaven.java:193) at org.apache.maven.DefaultMaven.execute(DefaultMaven.java:106) at org.apache.maven.cli.MavenCli.execute(MavenCli.java:863) at org.apache.maven.cli.MavenCli.doMain(MavenCli.java:288) at org.apache.maven.cli.MavenCli.main(MavenCli.java:199) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method) at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:62) at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:43) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.jav a:498) at org.codehaus.plexus.classworlds.launcher.Launcher.launchEnhanced(Launcher.java:289) at org.codehaus.plexus.classworlds.launcher.Launcher.launch(Launcher.java:229) at org.codehaus.plexus.classworlds.launcher.Launcher.mainWithExitCode(Launcher.java:415) at org.codehaus.plexus.classworlds.launcher.Launcher.main(Launcher.java:356)

Answer 1

After a lot of research we finally found what was going on. Very tricky this one but it makes sense:

Java 1.8 ASM ClassReader failed to parse class file - probably due to a new Java class file version that isn't supported yet

Essentially the new ASM is not reading classes the same way as it used to, and Spring 3 is reading them with the old ASM compatibility. This results in that I can run the application in Java 8 only if I change to Spring 4. Spring does guarantee compatibility between Spring 4 and any old java version since Java 6:

https://spring.io/blog/2015/04/03/how-spring-achieves-compatibility-with-java-6-7-and-8

The oposite is not true which means that I cannot run Spring 3 with Java 8, and so we now have a good migration work to do :).