It might happen that during the initial deployment you will see the cryptic ClassCastException: DummyContext, if that happened to you keep reading to find out more.

Symptoms

Following exception appears in the log file during startup of Magnolia 

10 Jan 2008 16:52:10,198 ERROR ContentRepository - System : Failed to load JCR "magnolia" org.apache.jackrabbit.core.jndi.provider.DummyContext
java.lang.ClassCastException: org.apache.jackrabbit.core.jndi.provider.DummyContext

Solution

So far every time I've encountered this problem it was due to the fact that jackrabbit's bindName (in WEB-INF/config/default/repositories.xml) was not set properly. Since magnolia sets this at runtime by using magnolia.webApp property that is initialized in ContextListener, if was always due to the fact that listener was either missing from web.xml or not working properly. You can verify this by replacing the magnolia.webapp variable in repositories.xml with the fix value. If the problem disappears then your magnolia.webApp variable is not being set and replaced properly and something is probably wrong with context listeners.