Spring and the java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: NULL Exception

A few days ago I was going through a project's Maven dependencies, removing unused junk, checking jar file version numbers adding a little dependency management and generally tidying up (yes, I know that this isn't something we often get time to do, but even Maven dependencies can be a form of technical debt). After recompiling and running the unit tests I ran some end to end tests only to find that the whole thing fell apart... Big time.

The exception I got was the usual one that all Spring developers get, a

    java.lang.IllegalStateException: Failed to load ApplicationContext

...exception. This is nothing new and as a Spring developer you find the problem, which is usually a missing bean definition and move on. Only this time it was something different, and that's because the cause was:

    java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: NULL

...which gives you no clues about what's going wrong.

Now I knew that I'd been messing around with the project's dependencies, so I must have broken something somewhere. It turned out that it was a transient dependency problem. I was using Spring Security version 3.1.1-RELEASE, which is built using version 3.0.7-RELEASE of the Spring core libraries and not as you'd expect version 3.1.1-RELEASE. This meant that I'd ended up with different and incompatible versions of some of the Spring libraries on my classpath.

You may well wonder why the Guys at Spring Security build their code with version 3.0.7-RELEASE and they say that this is intentional and that it's to do with backwards compatibility issues. As Rob Winch, Spring Security Lead at SpringSource, says: "Spring Security uses 3.0.x (intentionally to support users that require it). For this reason, if you build with Maven and want to use Spring 3.1 you must either exclude the Spring dependencies in your maven pom, explicitly add the Spring 3.1 dependencies to your pom, or add a dependency management section to your pom. This is not a bug. Even if Spring Security was changed to use Spring 3.1 by default, the users using Spring 3.0 would encounter the same problem. The reason this occurs is due to the algorithm that Maven uses to resolve transitive dependency versions [1]"

Once you know how, the problem is easy to spot. If you're using STS/eclipse you can easily examine Maven dependencies using the POM editor. The fix is simple too, all you need to do is to explicitly define the wayward Spring libraries in your POM. For example:

<dependency>
            <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
            <artifactId>spring-core</artifactId>
            <version>3.1.1-RELEASE</version>
        </dependency>

Finally, you can check that it's fixed using STS/eclipse's POM file editor, where you'll see that the unwanted version is now labelled as "omitted".

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[1] http://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-dependency-mechanism.html#Transitive_Dependencies