Andrej Koelewijn

I ran into the following problem yesterday while building a rest service using resteasy: the code would compile ok, but the unit tests wouldn’t run. I got the following exception in the output of the unit tests:

java.lang.ClassFormatError: Absent Code attribute in method that is not native or abstract in class file javax/ws/rs/ext/RuntimeDelegate
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:621)
	at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:124)

The problem is caused by the javeee-api dependency in my maven pom. As described here, the following dependency provides you with the java-ee api’s, not the implementation. This is ok for compiling, but can’t be used for executing code.

<dependency>
  <groupId>javax</groupId>
  <artifactId>javaee-api</artifactId>
  <version>6.0</version>
</dependency>

I thought i’d solved the issue by adding a scope of provided or even compile, but this doesn’t fix the problem. The maven build still fails with the Absent code attribute… error. Removing the dependency completely solves the issue for now, but will probably give me some problems when i add more code which uses jee6.