16th Feb 2008 by Mark Turansky
Beware the non-namespaced classpath resource
Filed under Engineering We spent too long hunting down a bug in a database method call that consistently returned “null” in our integration environment, but returned the correct value in a development unit test.
Do you see the problem here? Compare these two screenshots. Both screenshots show a look into two different jars on our classpath. The title of this article is a big hint.
Two points goes to the first person to explain the problem. (-2 points for any of my teammates that answer first!)
The moral of the story is that namespaces are one heck of a good idea and that we should always be very careful when relying on classpath-based resources. I’ll write more about the problem after giving others a chance to solve the puzzle.
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Let me guess… since each of the JARs has a hibernate.cfg.xml at the top level, it was picking up the first one in the classpath it found. Yup, namespaces can be handy for avoiding such conflicts.
Exactly right. Two projects by two different teams and there’s my team attempting an integration effort. It took a lot of digging to figure this out, but now we know. I’ll put a notch in the “experience” part of my brain.