FAQ by WuJiewen.com

This error is likely to happen when your version of JDK is lower than required by Tomcat. On Mac computers, even if you have chosen Java 6 for Tomcat 7 via the utility Application/Java Preference, the one used by Tomcat is JAVA_HOME (which may not be Java 6, even if you specified previously, check its value by "echo $JAVA_HOME").

To solve this problem, modify Tomcat/bin/startup.sh, add the following after the line "executable=catalina.sh" to use Java 6 (change 1.6 to other versions required). Or, you can simply add this line in the Shell.

export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home