Hi All,
I am currently using Tomcat 5.5.9 on Window XP Pro in my development
environment and I believe I have finally tracked down the
cause of a problem that has been plaguing me for some time. Until recently
I've not had the time to do the testing to establish what
the problem was. It appears to me that if you use a context.xml file inside a
WAR file and include in that file a <Context
...></Context> element (ie an element with opening and closing tags,
attributes, but no contents) Tomcat will not deploy the context
properly.
In my development environment, I put each of my web apps in its own
subdirectory of a directory called D:/webapps. For a new app,
I create a directory in D:\webapps (eg D:\webapps\newapp) and create new host
entry in server.xml with the Application Base
pointing to this directory.
I then build a WAR file, named ROOT.war, containing the web application and a
context.xml file inside its /META-INF directory. I
drop this into the appropriate ApplicationBase folder.
What I found is that sometimes Tomcat would pick this up and deploy it happily
and sometimes it just display a file listing (one file,
the ROOT.war file). In the latter case, the only thing that turned up in the
logs was something like this in the stderr log file:
17/10/2005 08:33:41 org.apache.catalina.startup.ContextConfig
applicationWebConfig
INFO: Missing application web.xml, using defaults only
StandardEngine[Catalina].StandardHost[newapp].StandardContext[]
Now the WAR file always contained a web.xml file in the WEB-INF directory and I
spent a lot of time playing with it, thinking there
may be something subtle wrong with it.
The problem was, if I unpacked the WAR file and added a root context (via the
Tomcat Admin interface) it all worked OK, suggesting
to me there was nothing wrong with the web.xml file.
I finally worked out that if you have a context.xml with the following contents:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Context reloadable="true" docbase="ROOT">
<!-- gratuitous comment -->
</Context>
or
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Context reloadable="true" docbase="ROOT">
</Context>
Tomcat will fail to deploy the web application and will display the "missing
application web.xml" message in the stderr log file.
however, if you change the context.xml file to the following:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Context reloadable="true" docbase="ROOT"/>
Tomcat deploys the application successfully.
I believe that the first two examples should work and that this constitutes a
bug. However, before posting it on bugzilla, I thought I'd
post it here to see what others thought. I also thought that by including the
error message, anyone else searching on "missing
application web.xml" would turn this message up and it might save them some
time working out what the problem is.
BTW, if anyone else wants to test this, I have some very simple WAR files I can
post/email to demonstrate the problem.
What does everyone else think?
Rob Hills
NetPaver Pty Ltd
West Perth
Western Australia
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