I just got a weird NullPointerException using Hibernate JPA. When creating my EntityManagerFactory, the usual logging started to appear and finished in stacktrace containing this:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.hibernate.hql.ast.ParameterTranslationsImpl.getNamedParameterExpectedType(ParameterTranslationsImpl.java:63)
at org.hibernate.engine.query.HQLQueryPlan.buildParameterMetadata(HQLQueryPlan.java:296)
at org.hibernate.engine.query.HQLQueryPlan.(HQLQueryPlan.java:97)
at org.hibernate.engine.query.HQLQueryPlan.(HQLQueryPlan.java:56)
at org.hibernate.engine.query.QueryPlanCache.getHQLQueryPlan(QueryPlanCache.java:72)
at org.hibernate.impl.SessionFactoryImpl.checkNamedQueries(SessionFactoryImpl.java:400)
at org.hibernate.impl.SessionFactoryImpl.(SessionFactoryImpl.java:351)
at org.hibernate.cfg.Configuration.buildSessionFactory(Configuration.java:1218)
at org.hibernate.ejb.Ejb3Configuration.buildEntityManagerFactory(Ejb3Configuration.java:691)

I could root it down to a NamedQuery in one of my Entites; when commenting it out, the creation went through fine. The Query definition looked like this:

@NamedQuery(
name = "User.find",
query = "SELECT user FROM User user WHERE user.id =: id"
)

After some googling I found a solution on the Spring forum: it's the whitespace between the colon and the variable name. The error message should be more specific here, or better yet, the whitespace should not throw an error.