title: Differences when running Tomcat from within Intellij IDEA?
body: <p>I have a very bizarre problem with a Spring 3.5, Webflow 2.2 application, running in Tomcat (6.0.32)</p>
  
  <p>Part of the webflow calls  to retrieve a list of objects. This list is placed in a viewScope object for use by a JSP view. Each object in this list inherits from a base class that contains some common fields.</p>
  
  <p>The webflow then forwards to a JSP view that displays the contents of this list, by writing out all the objects.</p>
  
  <p>When I run this from a stand-alone Tomcat, the fields on the base class are all somehow set to null. I have debugged and confirmed the list is built correctly from the code called by the webflow . So somewhere between putting the list into the webflow view scope, and then it later being retrieved by the JSP, the base class fields are being reset to null.</p>
  
  <p>The REALLY bizarre part of the problem is that the app runs perfectly if I start and run Tomcat from within Intellij IDEA. I've tried various JDKs and Tomcat versions, and all have the same issue. </p>
  
  <p>It appears to be a webflow problem (improper serialization maybe?) that's sensitive to whether Tomcat has been started from within IntelliJ.</p>
  
  <p>What is IntelliJ doing that could cause Java serialization to misbehave? </p>