Issue

We have an application which currently works in EAP 4.3.0 , but on upgrading to JBoss EAP 5 we are getting an error which is causing a jar to fail loading on startup.
We get the following error on startup;

FATAL [com.example.data.ContextLoaderListener] Failed to initialise application.
java.lang.NullPointerException
        at com.example.data.ContextLoaderListener.contextInitialized(ContextLoaderListener.java:210)

The web application is a WAR file and on startup this is calling the following line

Class dataClazz = parentLoader.loadClass("com.example.Data");
The application is a standard WAR file and is calling the class com.example.Data which is loaded within the lib folder of JBoss as an external jar file to the application.