I recently upgraded to Hibernate 4.0.1.Final and am receiving the following error on context startup:
Caused by: jav
Per the Hibernate annotations 3.5 documentation:*
Hibernate 3.5 and onward contains Hibernate Annotations.
You should remove the dependency on hibernate-annotations, and remove the excludes from the hibernate-entitymanager dependency. Generally, you should not mix versions of dependent packages.
* and JB Nizet's comment.