Grails 2.3.1 on Mac ; ClassNotFound NoUniqueBeanDefinitionException - macos

Question

Recently, I upgraded a Grails project to 2.3.1 from 2.0.1. The project runs fine on my Window's machine, and on my coworker's Mac (pulled via Git). On my Mac, though, I get this error when I try to run-app, after it finishes installing plugins and compiling:
ClassNotFoundException: org.springframework.beans.factory.NoUniqueBeanDefinitionException
The full stack trace is at http://pastebin.com/iEvKBmG5, but that's the crux of the error.
If I run grails in interactive mode, the server starts up, but when I browse to a controller, I just get a white page.
What could be different between my environment on my Mac and the environment on my colleague's that causes this error? Here's what I've tried in order to fix the issue:
Deleting the contents of my ~/.grails folder (as well as less extreme variants clearing particular subfolders)
Deleting the project and pulling it back from git
grails clean
Reinstalling grails 2.3.1 (using gvm, so the commands I ran were gvm uninstall grails 2.3.1, gvm flush archives, gvm install grails 2.3.1)
Cloning the project contents into a different directory
Checking my dependency report to make sure that the version of spring pulled is greater than 3.2.1, in which the NoUniqueBeanDefinitionException class was added. See http://pastebin.com/0AVC0SA0 for full report.
Verifying that the NoUniqueBeanDefinitionException.class file is inside the spring-beans jar, located at ~/.gvm/grails/2.3.1/lib/org.springframework/spring-beans/jars/spring-beans-3.2.4.RELEASE.jar.
grails refresh-dependencies myApplicationDependencies.xml Resulting file at http://pastebin.com/5bG9Vv78.
Manually deleted the 3.1.2 release of spring-beans and other spring jars from my maven repository, since that was being listed in the dependencies. Maven just re-resolves it though.
Switching the dependency resolver to ivy and getting a dependency report. The 3.1.2 version of Spring is listed as "evicted."
Both my colleague and I are running Mac OS X Mavericks and the latest version of Java. Any thoughts welcome.
UPDATE
I've also double-checked to make sure that my project doesn't contain duplicate classes. To do that, I ran grails dev war and used jar scan with the -double flag to search for duplicate classes. None were found.
Again, I am pretty sure the system isn't actually trying to throw a NoUniqueBeanDefinitionException. I think it's just trying to find that class and can't for some reason.
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Scanned archives: 2
Errors: 0
Archives with hits: 0

Answer 1

Maybe a problem with some file name upper/lower case. Check all source file names are correctly names (camel case) and there are not to file with the same name but different case
es:
Controllers/MyGreatController.groovy
Controllers/MygreatController.groovy
Failing that, take a look at the output of grails dependency-report. Make sure that the version of Spring that your project is pulling in is above or equal to 3.2.1, since that's the version of Spring where the NoUniqueBeanDefinitionException class was added. That class is in the spring-beans module. Also, make sure that none of your other dependencies are pulling in an older version of spring-beans.
If they are, you can tell Grails to ignore that transitive dependency with the excludes configuration option in BuildConfig.groovy. For example, let's say you're pulling in the activiti-engine jar from the mavenRepo "https://maven.alfresco.com/nexus/content/groups/public/". Change the dependency declaration to exclude spring-beans, and you should be right as rain.
compile("org.activiti:activiti-engine:5.13") {
excludes "spring-beans"
}
See http://grails.org/doc/2.3.1/guide/conf.html#dependencyResolution.

Answer 2

I had a dependency (activiti 5.13) that included and older version of the spring-beans module as a dependency of its own. For some reason, the version was winning out on my Mac, but was getting trumped on other workstations by the newer spring jar. The workaround was to exclude spring-beans from that dependency in my BuildConfig.groovy file.
...
dependencies {
// specify dependencies here under either 'build', 'compile', 'runtime', 'test' or 'provided' scopes eg.
compile("org.activiti:activiti-engine:5.13") {
excludes "spring-beans"
}
// runtime 'mysql:mysql-connector-java:5.1.16'
}
That prevents Grails from transitively resolving that particular dependency of my dependency.
See the information under Disabling transitive dependency resolution at http://grails.org/doc/2.3.1/guide/conf.html#configurationsAndDependencies.