Setting Up Tomcat for Servlet Development
Today I needed to set up Tomcat for servlet development and aside from Tomcat itself, the biggest challenge was in getting the new web app set up properly. It wasn't that bad, really, it was just a lot of moving parts with no error messages to speak of to let you know you had the moving parts hooked up wrong. For instance, I made the silly mistake of having my web.xml file in the root of the /web directory in my project. It was supposed to be in the WEB-INF directory in that directory. Without it being in the right place, nothing was seeming to work. But there were no errors indicating my mistake.
While I can understand that this is a user error - I did eventually figure out my mistake, there's nothing to say "Hey, here's a web app with no web.xml file" which would have put me on the right track a lot sooner.
Once I got it all set up properly, things seemed to flow pretty nicely. I was able to get a lot of good work done, and by the end of the day I was very close to a working prototype. I'm guessing by the end of this week I should have the first good cut all done. That will be a great relief.
It's all in the configuration. Watch it.