I recently encountered a strange error with GlassFish v3. I installed GlassFish on one of my test servers. The installation went fine. Then I attempted to log into the Admin Console at http://localhost:4848.  The page informed me that it was initializing….then all of sudden the page went blank. I tried reloading but encountered the same problem.

I checked the server logs to see if anything was funny. I found the following:

INFO: Unsanitized stacktrace from failed start...
 com.sun.faces.config.ConfigurationException:
 Source Document: jndi:/__asadmin/WEB-INF/faces-config.xml
 Cause: Unable to find class  'com.sun.webui.jsf.faces.UIComponentELResolver'
 at  com.sun.faces.config.processor.AbstractConfigProcessor.createInstance(AbstractConfigProcessor.java:273)

After poking around and Googling, I found that this problem can be solved by updating to Java 6 Update 17+. Hmmm, strange. My test box had an older version of the JDK, Java 6 Update 5 to be exact. I upgraded to the latest Java 6 update (20, at the time of this writing).  Now everything works just fine.

IMHO, the GlassFish admin app should at least perform a version check or give a meaningful error message. Without a proper error message, the user has no idea what went wrong.

Anyways, hope this helps.

Update:

I dug thru the documentation for GlassFish v3. The docs provide the system requirements and list JDK 1.6.0_17 as a minimum. RTFM 🙂