I discovered that I needed to use a later version of
the MySQL
connector, from the Maven repository, rather than the version of the
connector from the MySQL site, even though that version matched my
version of MySQL.
I have XEM 1.7.3 working with:
Tomcat 5.5.25 (-5ubuntu1.2)
MySQL 5.0.51a (-3ubuntu5.4)
Java 1.6.0_14
and mysql-connector-java-5.1.8-bin.jar from
http://www.mysql.com/products/connector/ .
For a while I was getting the same error and stack trace, but I had the database name
referenced incorrectly in hibernate.cfg.xml .
Trevor