In Tomcat, when the server is being shut down, it tries to set all static variables in classes it knows of to null. By touching these classes, their static initializers are run, which can result in an endless loop for some of our legacy classes which have massive static initializers .
Is there an elegant way to detect whether a shutdown is currently in progress? We could then check at the top of the static initializers whether we are in shutdown mode and then ignore the initialization.
The only way we found which seems to work is anything but elegant:
try{ Thread hook = new Thread(); Runtime.getRuntime().addShutdownHook( hook ); // fires "java.lang.IllegalStateException: Shutdown in progress" if currently in shutdown Runtime.getRuntime().removeShutdownHook( hook ); }catch(Throwable th){ throw new Error("Init in shutdown thread", th ); }