Deploying application using Hibernate JPA 2.1 to IBM WebSphere gives NullPointerException

Question

We are trying to deploy a Java 7 Spring MVC application using Hibernate into an IBM WebSphere 8.5.5.2 server. The application runs fine on a Tomcat server, but we cannot get

Answer 1

What worked for me is:

In the logs(copied from the OP's log), there is this:

[3/26/15 13:49:54:339 MDT] 00000066 LogHelper     Z org.hibernate.jpa.internal.util.LogHelper logPersistenceUnitInformation HHH000204: Processing PersistenceUnitInfo [
    name: default
    ...]

If you notice, it's trying to use the default persistence provider.

As such, if we do not specify explicitly the persistence provider to use, Hibernate is going to use the WAS Persistence Provider(i.e OpenJPA in this case) - and in the case of WebLogic, EclipseLink.

As WAS 8.5.5.x support only JPA 2.0(and JPA 1.0), this will not work and a bunch of errors will appear in the logs(...), such as those posted by the OP.

In order to solve it, i explicitly specified the third party persistence to Hibernate as per this post

I hope this will help someone.