[prabhat.jha]

I agree that NPE here does not give any info at all. I wish code checked for valid connection.

Just an FYI: You may get NPE because of class conflicts as well. For example, if your webapp has jars that come by default in JBoss AS. In my case it was jboss-common-core.jar

[johnburgess]

I've had the same problem in JBoss-5.1.0.GA.  I was trying to run CAS (the jasig common authentication server) on JBoss with it using my existing prc4 application policy to authenticate users.  However, it was failing with a null pointer exception in the logs.  Luckily, after a while (several hours, I'm afraid) we tried using the jmx-console policy instead and this worked.  A bit more experimentation showed that all the login modules worked except the DatabaseServerLoginModule.

I wrote a class that extended DatabaseServerLoginModule and had a lot more logging in it.  This confirmed that the lookup of the datasource was returning null.  I then got the class to print out the names and bound values in the java:/ namespace and found that prc4 was there and was bound correctly to a nmon-null value of the right class.  However, I still couldn't retrieve it.

I was about to write code that would create a new db connection of the ds was null when I came across this post.  I followed Prabhat Jha's advice abd checked if cas.war had any jboss libraries in it and found jboss-common-core-2.2.2.GA.jar.  When I removed this it all started working.  I think I hadn't found this thread when searching as I was exlicitly mentioning JBoss 5.  I'm hoping that this post of mine will help other lost souls to find the solution.

Many thanks and much kudos to Prabhat Jha!!