Unable to complete the scan for annotations for web application [/app] due to a StackOverflowError

Question

I am developing a Spring MVC application using STS (eclipse plugin) and maven.

For creating the project, I followed the STS wizard for a new "Spring MVC project". Afterwards, I added some dependencies to other projects and libraries.

However, when I am now trying to deploy the project to the integrated vFabric server of STS, I sometimes get an exception:

SEVERE: ContainerBase.addChild: start:  org.apache.catalina.LifecycleException: Failed to start component [StandardEngine[Catalina].StandardHost[localhost].StandardContext[/wsa]]     at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleBase.start(LifecycleBase.java:154)     at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChildInternal(ContainerBase.java:901)     ... Caused by: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Unable to complete the scan for annotations for web application [/app] due to a StackOverflowError. Possible root causes include a too low setting for -Xss and illegal cyclic inheritance dependencies. The class hierarchy being processed was [org.bouncycastle.asn1.ASN1EncodableVector->org.bouncycastle.asn1.DEREncodableVector->org.bouncycastle.asn1.ASN1EncodableVector]     at org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig.checkHandlesTypes(ContextConfig.java:2179)     ... 

When issuing a "maven clean", followed by a "maven install" and a restart of the server, the exception sometimes doesn't get thrown and the application works fine. Yet, most of the times, it doesn't work.

I guess there is no need to scan the bouncycastle dependencies for annotations.
Can I somehow disable this scanning for some jars?

I already tried adding metadata-complete="true" to my web.xml and increasing the stack size with no result.

What can I do to fix this?

Answer 1

In my case the org.bouncycastle.asn1.DEREncodableVector class, which was causing the cyclic dependency, was served by two jars in the class path.

bcprov-jdk15on-1.47.jar and bcprov-jdk16-1.45.jar

Excluded the unwanted jar(bcprov-jdk16-1.45.jar) and it worked well

Answer 2

You have a cyclic dependency. org.bouncycastle.asn1.ASN1EncodableVector depends on org.bouncycastle.asn1.DEREncodableVector which depends back on org.bouncycastle.asn1.ASN1EncodableVector which ... . This is an infinite cycle and so you're getting a StackOverflowException.

If you have the Maven plugin installed in Eclipse, look at the Dependency Hierarchy and look for these classes. I found someone with a similar issue here, he solved it by looking at the dependency tree and then adding an exclusion to break the cyclic dependency.