I came across this strange error, which baffled me for ages, but was simple to fix. I had duplicate resource references in web.xml and binding files. com.ibm.ws.exception.RuntimeError at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.ApplicationMgrImpl.startApplication(ApplicationMgrImpl.java:328) at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.ApplicationMgrImpl.start(ApplicationMgrImpl.java:268) at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.ContainerImpl.startComponents(ContainerImpl.java:536) at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.ContainerImpl.start(ContainerImpl.java:413) at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.ApplicationServerImpl.start(ApplicationServerImpl.java:152) at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.ContainerImpl.startComponents(ContainerImpl.java:536) at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.ContainerImpl.start(ContainerImpl.java:413) at com.ibm.ws.runtime.component.ServerImpl.start(ServerImpl.java:287) at com.ibm.ws.runtime.WsServer.start(WsServer.java:128)