On redeploy from Eclipse, Tomcat says "Missing application web.xml"

[mistersandiego]

For the benefit of others who encounter this problem, this post
describes the solution to a problem I encountered. I've been developing
and continually redeploying a servlet from the Eclipse development
system. All was well until the Tomcat servlet container suddenly began
saying, "Missing application web.xml, using default ..." whenever I
redeployed.

It turns out that the problem was that I had added logging to the
servlet, and I had it writing the log file down in the deployment
directory, in my case,
C:\jakarta-tomcat-5.5.9\webapps\MyServlet\WEB-INF\logfile.log

Evidently when I redeployed, Tomcat wasn't able to undeploy logfile.log
because it was still open and in use by the logger. This caused it to
be unable to redeploy, as I could see nothing in the deployment folders
other than the log file, even after the redeployment had supposedly
finished.

I haven't yet looked to see how to close the log file out (I'm just
getting started with log4j), so as a workaround, I've moved the log
file directory out of the deployment directory structure. Probably not
a bad idea anyway, just to keep the logs from being overwritten by a
redeployment. Anyway, this has fixed the problem.

 

[Oliver Wong]

For the benefit of others who encounter this problem, this post
describes the solution to a problem I encountered.

Thanks for posting the fix. Might be a good idea to make it more
explicit in the subject header that this is a fix rather than a question
though; e.g. "FIXED: On redeploy from eclipse, Tomcat says 'Missing
application web.xml'".

- Oliver