How to fix Tomcat5 XPathFactory#newInstance() failed to create an XPathFactory for the default object model: http://java.sun.com/jaxp/xpath/dom with the XPathFactoryConfigurationException: javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactoryConfigurationException: No XPathFctory implementation found for the object model: http://java.sun.com/jaxp/xpath/dom

Saw this exception on a RHEL5 box - our application stopped working after a yum update.

To fix it I deleted the symlink to /usr/share/java/xml-commons-apis.jar in /var/lib/tomcat5/common/endorsed and restarted tomcat.

The stack trace looked something like:

- XPathFactory#newInstance() failed to create an XPathFactory for the default object model: http://java.sun.com/jaxp/xpath/dom with the XPathFactoryConfigurationException: javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactoryConfigurationException: No XPathFctory implementation found for the object model: http://java.sun.com/jaxp/xpath/dom
java.lang.RuntimeException: XPathFactory#newInstance() failed to create an XPathFactory for the default object model: http://java.sun.com/jaxp/xpath/dom with the XPathFactoryConfigurationException: javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactoryConfigurationException: No XPathFctory implementation found for the object model: http://java.sun.com/jaxp/xpath/dom
at javax.xml.xpath.XPathFactory.newInstance(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.tools.xjc.reader.internalizer.Internalizer.(Internalizer.java:81)
at com.sun.tools.xjc.reader.internalizer.DOMForest.transform(DOMForest.java:448)
at com.sun.tools.xjc.api.impl.s2j.SchemaCompilerImpl.bind(SchemaCompilerImpl.java:221)
at org.apache.cxf.common.util.ReflectionInvokationHandler.invoke(ReflectionInvokationHandler.java:52)