Question

I have a pretty complex web-application where the whole DAO has been outsourced to an @Aspect class which will load database entities whenever methods are accessed which need those.

This whole approach is working wonderfully when the web app is launched from netbeans. However, when I try to deploy the same .war to a standalone tomcat (same version of tomcat, same version of java), I get the following exception upon startup:

Caused by: java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Advice precedence circularity error

And I just can’t figure out what is causing the problem and why the application runs fine when starting through netbeans.

Maven config:

        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>2.3.2</version>
            <configuration>
                <fork>false</fork>
                <meminitial>256m</meminitial>
                <maxmem>768m</maxmem>
                <source>1.6</source>
                <target>1.6</target>
                <encoding>${project.build.sourceEncoding}</encoding>
                <showWarnings>true</showWarnings>
                <showDeprecation>false</showDeprecation>
                <debug>true</debug>
                <debuglevel>lines,vars,source</debuglevel>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>
        <plugin>
            <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>2.2</version>
            <configuration>
                <archive>
                    <manifest>
                        <addClasspath>true</addClasspath>
                    </manifest>
                </archive>
                <webXml>src\main\webapp\WEB-INF\web.xml</webXml>
            </configuration>
        </plugin>

Spring: 3.1.0.RELEASE:

<context:annotation-config />
<context:component-scan base-package="my.package" />
<mvc:annotation-driven />
<mvc:resources mapping="/resources/**" location="/resources/" />
<aop:aspectj-autoproxy />

Java version:

java -version
java version "1.6.0_26"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_26-b03)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.1-b02, mixed mode)

I honestly don’t know what info I should include in this post as I don’t even know where to start… Feel free to ask for more information if needed.

Answer 1

This isn’t necessarily a complete answer but the links should be helpful:

It sounds as if the difference here is that your machines are returning the order of declared methods, of a particular class, differently, which changes how Aspect advices are run:

Spring uses getDeclaredMethods to determine the order of the advices,
but getDeclaredMethods returns methods in unspecified order. (see more)

There is also a Spring ticket for an issue that sounds very similar to yours:
SPR-5314

Hope that’s a little helpful. Good luck.