It certainly can, if the same class file is present in different classpath entries. For example, if your classpath is: java -cp a.jar:b.jar com.foo.App
, and:
a.jar:
pkg/SomeClass.class
b.jar:
pkg/SomeClass.class
Then this can happen - usually because one of the jars on your classpath is an older version than the other, or the same but more complicated: one of the jars of your classpath contains a whole heap of different libraries all squished together and one of those components is an older version.
There are some basic hygiene rules to observe:
- Don't squish jars together. If you have 500 deps, put 500 entries on your classpath. We have tools to manage this stuff, use them. Don't make striped jars, uber jars, etc.
- Use dependency trackers to check if there are version difference in your dependency chain. If your app depends on, say, 'hibernate' and 'jersey', and they both depend on google's guava libraries, but hibernate imports v26 and jersey imports v29, that's problematic. Be aware of it and ensure that you explicitly decide which version ends up making it. Presumably, you'd want to explicitly pick v29 and perhaps check that hibernate also runs on v29*. If it doesn't, you have bigger problems. They are fixable (with modular classloaders), but not easily.
*) Neither hibernate nor jersey actually depend on guava, I'm just using them as hypothetical examples.
For example, if you use maven, check out the enforcer plugin. (groupId: org.apache.maven.plugins, artifactId: maven-enforcer-plugin).