[hibernate-issues] [Hibernate-JIRA] Commented: (HHH-2947) NPE on initialization of Hibernate

NPE on initialization of Hibernate ---------------------------------- Key: HHH-2947 URL: http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/hibernate/browse/HHH-2947 Project: Hibernate3 Issue Type: Bug Components: core Affects Versions: 3.2.5 Reporter: Jörg Heinicke Priority: Minor There seems to be a rare case when Hibernate fails with a NPE on initialization: http://forum.springframework.org/showthread.php?t=46034 The actual stacktrace is Caused by: java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.reset(Configuration.java:168) at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.<init>(Configuration.java:187) at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.<init>(Configuration.java:191) ... Caused by: java.lang.NullPointerException at org.hibernate.util.ConfigHelper.getResourceAsStream(ConfigHelper.java:144) at org.hibernate.cfg.Environment.<clinit>(Environment.java:524) ... 26 more I don't know exactly which Hibernate version the user used but there seems to be only one potential null pointer in the whole method and this is still in line 144 in the latest code: stream = Environment.class.getClassLoader().getResourceAsStream( stripped ); Class.getClassLoader() is allowed to return null following the Java API: http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/lang/Class.html#getClassLoad.... So you might consider handling this particular case in which it can happen, when Environment.class gets loaded by the bootstrap classloader.