Usually when I'm using an app server, I don't really have the time to start from an empty configuration and configure all the web.xml parameters, but this time I did so, and I'm glad I did it. I'm especially glad because I not only configured in servlets, but I also nailed down the bare bones of getting a nice SOAP template.

If you just cut and paste an existing web.xml file from say the Tomcat examples, then you get this innocuos little snippet by default:

<servlet-mapping> <servlet-name>invoker</servlet-name> <url-pattern>/servlet/*</url-pattern> </servlet-mapping>

When I started from scratch though I didn't have the servlet mapping and I had quite a puzzle trying to figure out why my servlets weren't executing. Once I added that mapping, it works like a charm. Anyways, I'm glad to have added it to my latest J2EE template.

I discovered another gotcha when running in my simple environment when I tried to load classes in the javax.* namespaces. It turns out my classpath set when running ant wasn't loading these classes and all my calls to the SOAP classes failed. When I added the SOAP classes to the WEB-INF/lib of my application, then it worked liked a charm. After reading the After looking through the Tomcat Class Loader-FAQ I now believe that this was related security in the class loader.