First, the problem:
When I try to enable the axis2 facet by any means (listed below) I'll get a NullPointerException. The three ways it could be enabled are
1.) During the creation of a brand new 'Dynamic Web Project'
2.) Going in to Properties and enabling it in the facets panel
3.) Attempting to create a web service client from wsdl (this implicitly add the facet).
No matter what I do though, it fails. The Exception that I found in the logs for method #1 above is:
!ENTRY org.eclipse.wst.common.project.facet.core 4 0 2013-01-23 16:35:56.971
!MESSAGE Failed while installing Axis2 Web Services Core 1.1.
!STACK 0
java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.eclipse.wst.validation.internal.DisabledResourceManager.save(DisabledResourceManager.java:67)
at org.eclipse.wst.validation.internal.DisabledResourceManager.disableValidation(DisabledResourceManager.java:49)
at org.eclipse.wst.validation.ValidationFramework.disableValidation(ValidationFramework.java:129)
at org.eclipse.jst.ws.axis2.facet.commands.Axis2WebservicesServerCommand.executeOverride(Axis2WebservicesServerCommand.java:110)
at org.eclipse.jst.ws.axis2.facet.deligate.Axis2CoreFacetInstallDelegate.execute(Axis2CoreFacetInstallDelegate.java:43)
at org.eclipse.wst.common.project.facet.core.internal.FacetedProject.callDelegate(FacetedProject.java:1477)
at org.eclipse.wst.common.project.facet.core.internal.FacetedProject.modifyInternal(FacetedProject.java:441)
at org.eclipse.wst.common.project.facet.core.internal.FacetedProject.mergeChangesInternal(FacetedProject.java:1181)
at org.eclipse.wst.common.project.facet.core.internal.FacetedProject.access$2(FacetedProject.java:1117)
at org.eclipse.wst.common.project.facet.core.internal.FacetedProject$5.run(FacetedProject.java:1099)
at org.eclipse.core.internal.resources.Workspace.run(Workspace.java:2344)
at org.eclipse.wst.common.project.facet.core.internal.FacetedProject.mergeChanges(FacetedProject.java:1109)
at org.eclipse.wst.common.project.facet.core.internal.FacetedProjectWorkingCopy.commitChanges(FacetedProjectWorkingCopy.java:2020)
at org.eclipse.wst.common.project.facet.ui.internal.FacetsPropertyPage$4.run(FacetsPropertyPage.java:232)
at org.eclipse.core.internal.resources.Workspace.run(Workspace.java:2344)
at org.eclipse.wst.common.project.facet.ui.internal.FacetsPropertyPage$5.run(FacetsPropertyPage.java:246)
at org.eclipse.jface.operation.ModalContext$ModalContextThread.run(ModalContext.java:121)
Based on what I've seen about this problem elsewhere I'll get these items out of the way now:
1.) The path to axis2 is already configured under Preferences and Eclipse claims that Axis2 has been loaded successfully.
2.) I have no reason to doubt the axis2 configuration as existing projects can use the Axis2 tools just fine (ones that had the facet enabled long ago).
3.) Creating a fresh project in a brand new workspace has no problems so somewhere in the myriad of files under .plugins something has gone awry, but I'm at a loss as to what it could be.
4.) Creating a brand new workspace and starting from scratch isn't really a good solution(though it might be my only one). For better or worse a lot of my work right now is in this workspace and I'd hate to have to switch over and migrate things in the middle of a project. I'm honestly not sure what I would lose between workspaces other than server and project configurations, but that is probably enough to annoy me.
5.) There was a bug filed for this at some point, it ended up being marked INVALID because of the assumption that the person having the issue had not configured the axis2 path.
Any help on this would be much appreciated.