I keep running into a frustrating issue while working with the Google Drive API in Java. Every time I try to run my application, I get this error message:
java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: com.google.api.client.googleapis.services.json.AbstractGoogleJsonClient
This problem shows up consistently whether I’m building a web application with servlets or a standalone Java SE program. I’ve tried different approaches but the same error keeps appearing. The code compiles fine but fails at runtime with this method not found exception.
Has anyone encountered this specific error before? What could be causing the AbstractGoogleJsonClient class to throw a NoSuchMethodError? I’m wondering if it’s a dependency version conflict or missing library issue.
Hit this same error six months back during a migration. You’ve got multiple versions of Google HTTP client libraries on your classpath. Maven’s pulling in different transitive dependencies from various Google libraries - your compiled code expects one method signature but runtime loads a different version. Fixed it by explicitly declaring google-http-client and google-http-client-jackson2 versions in dependency management. Forces consistency across all Google API deps. Check for shaded or fat JARs that might bundle conflicting versions too. Verbose classloading will show you which JAR actually loads at runtime vs what you expect.
This NoSuchMethodError happens when your Google API client libraries don’t match up version-wise. I hit this same problem using an old google-api-client with a newer google-api-services-drive. The AbstractGoogleJsonClient class signature changed between versions, so the runtime couldn’t find the method it expected. Check your Maven or Gradle dependencies - make sure all your Google API libraries are compatible versions. I’d go with the latest stable versions of both google-api-client and google-api-services-drive, and double-check that your google-oauth-client version matches too. Running a dependency tree analysis saved me - it showed exactly which versions were conflicting.
totally feel you on this! had a similar issue once, it was just a mismatch in dependencies. make sure all your google-api versions are aligned in your build file. it really helped me fix it.