I was able to get my projects to finally deployed.
Problem was related to Annotated class for hibernate persistence. I had a jpa 2.0 specification @ElementCollection annotation in my bean but I was on jpa 1.0 spec.
Things I tried:
1. Changed my persistence.xml file to be 2.0:
<persistence version="2.0" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence
http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/ ... ce_2_0.xsd ">
2. Had to use jboss 6 with this deployment because the previous jboss 5.1 was using hibernate core 3.3.1
3. Still got the same error relating to BeanValidationActivator can not access a member of "public static"
4. Searched for public static everywhere to see if I had any annotations tied to it. Found none.
5. Started deleting ejb's, annotated domain objects...nothing worked.
6. Removed the persistence.xml file and the project finally deployed but now I don't have container managed persistence with my ejb's so that's no good.
7. Said screw it, reverted back to jpa spec 1.0 in my persistence.xml, changed server back to jboss 5.1, changed my annotation in my bean to @ManyToMany(instead of @ElementCollection) for my map and everything loaded fine.
This is not an ideal solution for me and I'm not sure if this will even work because my project uses hibernate 3.6 but jboss 5.1 has 3.3.1 as a core lib dependency. I could replace it but I don't want to mess with the cross dependency versions so I'm going to do more testing to see if there are any problems.
If someone has figured out why this error occurs: Class org.hibernate.cfg.beanvalidation.BeanValidationActivator can not access a member of "public static" PLEASE SHARE
I'm baffled as to the exact problem and my solution is a super hack level 1million!!!!!!!!
Minh