I found the cause of the problem. In looking through the stack trace, I
found that in one file commented lines were supposedly causing the
exception! Obviously that wasn't right. It turns out that when I
deployed the web service using JAXB onto the application server, it was
using its own version of JAXB 2.0, the same one that comes with the
JWDSP. Even when I updated the JAXB jar files in the server library with
each new build you released, it made no difference because the file
appservws.jar has to exist for the application server to startup and as
long as it does exist any updated JAXB jars are ignored.
In any case, I solved the problem by reverting to the JWDSP version of
JAXB 2.0. Now JAXBContext.newInstance works fine again. I am still
confused about if changing builds of JAXB 2.0 should result in this
error? Also, perhaps there is some more hinting way to handle this
problem than with the NullPointerException?
Ryan