Spring - Context Initialization failed

Sometimes when trying to launch a spring app on your webserver, it might not launch due to a context initialization failure. An obvious reason for this failure is that the applicationContext cannot be found or the DB login credentials are incorrect. However, this wasn't the problem in my case. It finally struck me that the app might be expecting the jdbc password to be encrypted (base64 in my case) and not in plain text. Once I substituted the base64 version of my password in the properties file, I was able to launch the app successfully.