It’s Only Software

I was banging my head against the wall due to this problem. Apparently there is an issue with Spring IDE 2.0.2 running on a Java 6 platform - simply put, it doesn’t work. There’s a JIRA filed on this, along with some discussion [#1], [#2]in the Spring forums. I reverted to manually installing Spring IDE 2.0.1 from the update site (unzip, then use eclipse -clean), and it worked again.

This was on a brand new Eclipse 3.3 install with no prior trace of the Spring IDE plugin

Hopefully this helps someone. The error that I saw upon startup of Eclipse was:

java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class org.springframework.core.CollectionFactory
at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultSingletonBeanRegistry.<init>(DefaultSingletonBeanRegistry.java:86)
at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.FactoryBeanRegistrySupport.<init>(FactoryBeanRegistrySupport.java:40)
at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.<init>(AbstractBeanFactory.java:146)
at org.springframework.ide.eclipse.beans.core.DefaultBeanDefinitionRegistry.<init>(DefaultBeanDefinitionRegistry.java:72)
at org.springframework.ide.eclipse.beans.core.internal.model.BeansConfig.readConfig(BeansConfig.java:707)
[snip]

I was recently checking out the sample applications that ship with Spring Web Flow 2.0. In order to build the examples, you have to run an ant build that involves the Ivy Dependency Manager.

I was doing this behind a proxy server which requires username/password authentication, which unfortunately isn’t documented in the Ivy FAQ.

In case anyone runs into this particular problem, here’s how I solved it. Set the following environment variable (note this is all on a single line - I’ve added line breaks for readability):

set ANT_OPTS=-Dhttp.proxyHost=myproxyhost -Dhttp.proxyPort=8080 -Dhttp.proxyUserName=myproxyusername -Dhttp.proxyPassword=myproxypassword -Dhttps.proxyHost=myproxyhost -Dhttps.proxyPort=8080

Replace as appropriate for your environment.