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Random unreproducable Java error of the day

I mean I’m really kind of of the opinion that Java Sevlets, at least when using Tomcat and the other open source tools, don’t work. I mean surely it can’t be difficult to implement a Servlet container or logging framework!

I just tried to start Tomcat and it refused to start because of the following error:

log4j:ERROR Error occured while converting date.
java.lang.NullPointerException
  at java.lang.System.arraycopy(Native Method)
  at java.lang.AbstractStringBuilder.getChars
  at java.lang.StringBuffer.getChars
  at org.apache.log4j.helpers.ISO8601DateFormat.format
  at java.text.DateFormat.format
  ...
  at org.apache.log4j.Category.log
  at org.apache.commons.logging.impl.Log4JLogger.error
  ...
  at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.LeaderFollowerWorkerThread.runIt
  at org.apache.tomcat.util.threads.ThreadPool$ControlRunnable.run
  at java.lang.Thread.run
log4j:ERROR Error occured while converting date.

So I just hit “start” again, and this time it starts without error.

And people trust their mission-critical server architecture to this stuff!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 21st, 2008 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Broken, Java. You can subscribe to Adrian's blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Random unreproducable Java error of the day”

  1. Hugo Says: February 8th, 2008 at 12:00 am

    Wow man, that’s creepy.
    We use log4j for systems that at least claim (although I resent it) “five nines” availability.
    Although not surprising, log4j is by inspection not thread safe! (at least not the old version i read).
    Maybe you should edit the post to be more searcheable regarding problems with log4j.
    thanks,
    Hugo

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