java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: apache-tomcat-7.0.

While deploying my application to a tomcat server I'm facing following errors:

2013-06-14 07:54:36 ErrorLogger [ERROR] Job (DEFAULT.NearByRioDeJaneiro threw an exception.
org.quartz.SchedulerException: Job threw an unhandled exception. [See nested exception: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class com.frrole.service.common.OAuthUtil]
    at org.quartz.core.JobRunShell.run(JobRunShell.java:224)
    at org.quartz.simpl.SimpleThreadPool$WorkerThread.run(SimpleThreadPool.java:557)
Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class com.frrole.service.common.OAuthUtil
    at com.frrole.service.common.City._getTweetsByQueryObj(City.java:357)
    at com.frrole.service.common.City.getTweetsByGeoLocSearch(City.java:340)
    at com.frrole.service.api.TwitterSearch.nearbyLocationSearch(TwitterSearch.java:148)
    at com.frrole.service.imports.jobs.NearByRioDeJaneiro.execute(NearByRioDeJaneiro.java:14)
    at org.quartz.core.JobRunShell.run(JobRunShell.java:213)

As it can be observed from this error log the main problem is with tomcat not being able to locate: com.frrole.service.common.OAuthUtil class. This class is referenced by the method _getTweetsByQueryObj in class com.frrole.service.common.City. Hence, somewhere while executing this method, tomcat is unable to locate OAuthUtil class. The OAuthUtil class has proper package statement defined in its code. The application also compiles successfully otherwise ws.war would not have been produced.

The confusing part is that OAuthUtil class is in same package (and directory) as City class. Below is a ls of directory tree in ws directory of tomcat's webapps folder.

root@servicesfrrole3:/usr/tomcat/apache-tomcat-7.0.25/webapps/ws/WEB-INF/classes/com/frrole/service/common# ls -l
total 88
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 12284 2013-06-14 13:15 City.class
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 21350 2013-06-14 13:15 DBUtil.class
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1064 2013-06-14 13:15 Messages.class
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  2026 2013-06-14 13:15 OAuthUtil$_AccessToken.class
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  2741 2013-06-14 13:15 OAuthUtil.class
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1710 2013-06-14 13:15 ReTweet.class
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1431 2013-06-14 13:15 SQLUtils.class
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  6397 2013-06-14 13:15 TimeAgo.class
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  3363 2013-06-14 13:15 Tweet.class
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  3730 2013-06-14 13:15 TweetUtil.class
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  5982 2013-06-14 13:15 TweetVO.class
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1328 2013-06-14 13:15 TwitterResults.class
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1941 2013-06-14 13:15 ViaTweet.class

As it can be observed, clearly there is a OAuthUtil.class residing in the same directory as City.class. The code compiles properly and runs perfectly on localhost which has Java 7 and Tomcat 7.0.40. The server has Java 7 and Tomcat 7.0.25 on server.

While deploying application, I'm simply compiling it on localhost and copying the ws.war file into webapps directory of server followed by rm -r of ws folder from previous application and finally restarting the server.

If anyone has any explanation of what is happening here, please provide some solution.

The clue is in the exception message:

"Could not initialize class com.frrole.service.common.OAuthUtil"

What has actually happened is that an error has occurred previously in some class initializer. (Maybe the OAuthUtil class itself, or maybe some other class that it depends on.) If you look back through the log file, you should see the exception.

Now you have executed some code that depends on that class that previously failed initialization. The result is this exception.

If you can't find the previous exception in your log files, it is probably due to the exception being "squashed", or being lost when some thread died because your application hasn't defined a default uncaught exception handler.