I just had to upgrade my IBM JDK version from the one that came with the WebSphere 7 to fix an issue with Groovy. Now however when my app starts up I get the following stack trace and the error kills my apps initialization good and proper.
2013-06-08 17:59:06,574~WebContainer : 10~ERROR~com.myapp.application.webui.spring.XmlWebApplicationContext~Failed to load context org.springframework.beans.FatalBeanException: Failed to load context; nested exception is org.springframework.transaction.TransactionSystemException: Could not commit JDBC transaction; nested exception is com.ibm.ejs.cm.exception.TransactionAbortedException: JTS/JTA transaction has been aborted at com.myapp.application.webui.spring.XmlWebApplicationContext.refresh(XmlWebApplicationContext.java:162) at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader.configureAndRefreshWebApplicationContext(ContextLoader.java:389) at org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoader.initWebApplicationContext(ContextLoader.java:294) at com.myapp.application.webui.spring.ContextLoaderListener.contextInitialized(ContextLoaderListener.java:24) at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.webapp.WebApp.notifyServletContextCreated(WebApp.java:1718) at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.webapp.WebApp.commonInitializationFinish(WebApp.java:385) at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.webapp.WebAppImpl.initialize(WebAppImpl.java:299) at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.webapp.WebGroupImpl.addWebApplication(WebGroupImpl.java:100) at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.VirtualHostImpl.addWebApplication(VirtualHostImpl.java:166) at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.WSWebContainer.addWebApp(WSWebContainer.java:732) at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.WSWebContainer.addWebApplication(WSWebContainer.java:617) at com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.component.WebContainerImpl.install(WebContainerImpl.java:376)
If I switch back to old JDK I don't get this but I'm stuck with a known issue with Groovy. Also there are currently a number of other websphere environments running the same war file without issue.
The version I upgraded to is 6.0.13.2 of the IBM JDK. Running on Centos 6.4. I also tried 6.0.10.
Googling the issue just shows other people with similar problems.
Turned out the IBM WebSphere JDK installs are not compatible with Websphere(???). I found a fix in the websphere section that was a package (.pak file) of the JDK and installed that via the updater and now everything is working correctly.