How to debug NoSuchMethodError exception ? org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.addAnnotatedClass(Ljava/lang/Class;) - eclipse

Question

When I try to initialize a Hibernate 4 SessionFactory in a servlet:
Configuration config;
ServiceRegistry registry;
SessionFactory factory;
config = new Configuration();
config = config.addAnnotatedClass(Star.class); // <-- Exception here.
I get an exception:
SEVERE: Servlet.service() for servlet [hu.adamsan.store.TestHibernate] in context with path [/TestProject] threw exception [Servlet execution threw an exception] with root cause
java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.addAnnotatedClass(Ljava/lang/Class;)Lorg/hibernate/cfg/Configuration;
at hu.adamsan.store.TestHibernate.doGet(TestHibernate.java:75)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:621)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:728)
at
When I looked up in Google, I could not find a solution, but similar errors were present when there was a mismatch with the hibernate version. I've made a similar project, with the exact same maven dependencies, with the same code initializing hibernate in a doGet method, and it worked.
maven dependencies:
mysql-connector-java 5.1.26
hibernate-core 4.2.6.Final
hibernate-validator 5.0.1.Final
commons-beanutils 1.8.3
commons-collections 3.2.1
log4j 1.2.17
slf4j-api 1.7.5
Does anyone have an idea, what could be wrong?
Can someone offer general advice, how to handle, debug such obscure errors?

Answer 1

When you get a NoSuchMethodError in external libraries, it is usually due to having multiple versions of the same dependency on the classpath. This might be due to a transitive dependency, so detecting it through just looking at the dependency in the pom.xml of your project is not enough. If you do a mvn dependency:tree, it will list all transitive dependencies as well, so look for multiple versions of the same dependency.
It might also be that the same class is implemented is multiple dependencies, so google it to find out which jars contain it. http://www.jarfinder.com/index.php/java/info/org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration