This is caused by missing of the Hibernate commons annotations library.

Initial SessionFactory creation failed.java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: 
org/hibernate/annotations/common/reflection/ReflectionManager
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
	at com.mkyong.persistence.HibernateUtil.buildSessionFactory(HibernateUtil.java:19)
	at com.mkyong.persistence.HibernateUtil.<clinit>(HibernateUtil.java:8)
	at com.mkyong.common.App.main(App.java:11)
Caused by: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/hibernate/annotations/common/reflection/ReflectionManager
	at com.mkyong.persistence.HibernateUtil.buildSessionFactory(HibernateUtil.java:13)
	... 2 more
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.hibernate.annotations.common.reflection.ReflectionManager
	at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:200)
	at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
	at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:188)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:307)
	at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:252)
	at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:320)
	... 3 more

Solution

You can download the library from Hibernate official website

Or

Add the dependency in Maven’s pom.xml

        <dependency>
		<groupId>hibernate-commons-annotations</groupId>
		<artifactId>hibernate-commons-annotations</artifactId>
		<version>3.0.0.GA</version>
	</dependency>

P.S You may need to include the JBoss repository in order to download the Hibernate common annotation library.

<repositories>
    <repository>
      <id>JBoss repository</id>
      <url>http://repository.jboss.com/maven2/</url>
    </repository>
  </repositories>
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[ Read More ] You can find more similar articles at Hibernate Tutorials