JA-SIG CAS services registry persistence

I was pulling my hair trying to get JA-SIG CAS to work with persistet service registry. By default CAS comes with a in-memory services registry, this is not at all acceptable in production, so I went about following the instructions in http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/CASUM/Configuring under ServicesRegistry and Database Connection. I didn’t pay much attention to “Package your webapp and go for a try”, instead I chose to put in the necessary jars into the lib/ directory manually.

Eventhough I got all the necessary jars in place I was being confronted to a “java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/hibernate/ejb/HibernatePersistence”. I double checked still no avail. I tried Googling, but didn’t lead me to anything very useful.

All the problems went away once I made the changes to the CAS distribution and recompiled. WOW, that was a ride of the life time. It was weird that JDBC authentication handler worked alright by placing the jars in place manually but services registry wouldn’t work the same way.

I guess this post will help someone who runs into the same problem.