We are developing a project where we use JSF , Hibernate and Portal(JSR) in WebSphere Portal v5.1.
However, when we create an empty JSF portlet project and add the hibernate required jars, the portlet won't run, and no exceptions are thrown in the log files -- only "application stopped".

After some trial and error, we discovered that after removing the commons-logging.jar (which is required by hibernate), the application *seems to* work fine. But we don't know what was the problem at the first place.

My question is:
Does anybody know what is the problem and whether hibernate may complain at some stage due to the missing jar?

Thanks.