Injected beans are null after Tomcat restart with Spring and Axis2

Question

I have these beans:

<bean id="Child" class="test.Child"></bean>

<bean id="Parent" class="test.Parent">
    <property name="child" ref="Child" />
</bean>

I use Axis2, Spring with Hibernate on Tomcat. The Axis services are located in the Parent bean. It is mapped as SpringBeanName in the services.xml, including correct ServiceClass. I placed logs in the get and set methods for the Child beans variables inside the Parent bean:

private Child child;
public void setChild(Child child) {
   this.child = child;
   System.out.println(child);
}
public Child getChild() {
   System.out.println(child);
   return child;
}

I have a Spring initializing service called at startup, to load Spring in the startUp method in a service implementing ServiceLifeCycle.

    ClassLoader classLoader = service.getClassLoader();
    ClassPathXmlApplicationContext applicationContext = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext(
            new String[] { "classpath:spring/applicationContext.xml" }, false);
    applicationContext.setClassLoader(classLoader);
    applicationContext.refresh();

This is a simple example project, since the logic is quite more complex in real. Anyway, the result is:

• Deploy AAR in Axis2 war distribution's services, everything loads perfect, the set method is actually called with non null object.
• Every time the service is called, child is successfully read.

The problem is when Tomcat get restarted. In the starting logs, the set method is called with non null object. But when the service is called - Null Pointer Exception, child is null. Redeploying the AAR makes everything working again. But after a new restart - the child is null again.

What is happening? Every help will be appreciated.

• Note: I do not create the child with new. All scopes of the beans are default. I tried with prototype scope with no success. Session and request scopes threw an exception that these scopes are not recognized:

  No Scope registered for scope '...'

• Note 2: Uncommenting the tag in the context.xml in the conf folder did not changed anything. I restarted Tomcat after the change.

Answer 1

I found a solution, though, it does not cover all the range of situations. Changing the scope of the service in the services.xml from application to request (or the other two) fixes the problem which seems a bit logical.

Note: In case that application scope is what you really need, this fix is not applicable.