Tomcat Feedback

[Ben Hutchison]

Hi Tomcat Developers,   I work at Finetix London, a technical consultancy working with a lot of J2EE and XML/XSL technology. Over the last weeks, my colleage and I have been using Tomcat 3.2.1 for JSP/Servlet development, and we encountered a couple of glitches/issues which I describe below.     1. When using Xalan 2 with Tomcat, the default classpath shadows some Xalan 2 classes with classes in jaxp.jar and parser.jar, so that Xalan fails to work. Editing of tomcat.bat is required to fix the problem by moving Xalan.jar forward.     2. Inheritance of MIME mappings from the base web.xml to web apps did not seem to work, although the docs specified this behavior. Eg: We set up a mapping for .WML files in the base web.xml, restarted, but WML files were served as plain text. The same mapping in the web apps /WEB_INF/web.xml file did effect the mapping.     3. Exception messages of type org.apache.jasper.compiler.ParseException (eg: "C:\software\tomcat\webapps\test\MyTest.jsp(20,4) Invalid directive") are often quite uninformative. They dont supply details about the expression that caused the problem, nor why that expression was "bad" or "invalid". This makes development more difficult. Also these exceptions dont seem to be logged.   4. . When using Xalan 2.0.1 with Tomcat 3.2.1, the default config shadows some Xalan 2 classes with classes in jaxp.jar and parser.jar, so that Xalan fails to work. Editing of tomcat.bat is required to fix the problem by moving Xalan.jar forward. Since Xalan and Tomcat are both from Apache projects, both recent production versions, and are very likely to be used together, I think they should co-exist well out-of-the-box.     5. The resolution of filename URLs within JSP Pages seemed a frequent source of trouble, (Eg <%@ include file="relative url">).     a) We found it very difficult to determine exactly what URL format tomcat undertstands. It didnt seem to be standard and it didnt seem to be documented.     b) It frequently throws exceptions for relative URLs of the form "../X" or "./" where it reports a bad file argument, but doesnt print either the file argument that thinks is bad, nor the reason why.     c) We were unable to find a url form that allowed us to specify paths to other drive letters under Windows.     6. There seems to be little or no description in the docs of how to put pages into the server root dir. The docs focus on web-app context-linked sub-directories. Could this be described more prominently?     7. (Minor) The /test index.html would be more useful with hyperlinks the actual test pages below it.   Regards Ben