Just a heads up.
If you are using OS X have installed the KyngChaos GDAL framework (required for the latest QGIS) and want to run GeoServer locally… It appears the GDAL framework places some links to jars in /Library/Java/Extensions. One of these, commons-lang-2.6.jar, will cause an issue if you attempt to run GeoServer on the same machine. A GeoServer error will show any time you attempt to touch the WFS configuration. With exceptions like:
org.apache.wicket.WicketRuntimeException: Exception in rendering component: [MarkupContainer [Component id = srsNameStyle]]
[ stack trace … ]
Caused by: org.apache.commons.lang.SerializationException: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.geoserver.wfs.WFSInfo$Version
[ stack trace …]
Caused by: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.geoserver.wfs.WFSInfo$Version
[ stack trace …]
Removing the linked jars in /Library/Java/Extensions resolved the issue. It seems there is a similar issue with some EE containers but I was running with just Tomcat and Jetty and experienced the error.
Tom.