WARNING: Exception encountered during context initialization - cancelling refresh attempt

This was my stupidity, but a stupidity that was not easy to identify :).

Problem:

1. My code is compiled on Jdk 1.8.
2. My eclipse, had JDK 1.8 as the compiler.
3. My tomcat in eclipse was using Java 1.7 for its container, hence it was not able to understand the .class files which were compiled using 1.8.
4. To avoid the problem, ensure in your eclipse, double click on your server -> Open Launch configuration -> Classpath -> JRE System Library -> Give the JDK/JRE of the compiled version of java class, in my case, it had to be JDK 1.8
   5. Post this, clean the server, build and redeploy, start the tomcat.

If you are deploying manually into your server, ensure your JAVA_HOME, JDK_HOME points to the correct JDK which you used to compile the project and build the war.

If you do not like to change JAVA_HOME, JDK_HOME, you can always change the JAVA_HOME and JDK_HOME in catalina.bat(for tomcat server) and that'll enable your life to be easy!

The important part is this:

Cannot find class [com.rakuten.points.persistence.manager.MemberPointSummaryDAOImpl] for bean with name 'MemberPointSummaryDAOImpl' defined in ServletContext resource [/WEB-INF/context/PersistenceManagerContext.xml];

due to:

nested exception is java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.rakuten.points.persistence.manager.MemberPointSummaryDAOImpl

According to this log, Spring could not find your MemberPointSummaryDAOImpl class.