Specification of user's servlets

Question

Hi,
I am working on tomcat4.1 and the servlets were also working fine.But in an attempt of doing some R&D I changed my server.xml.Now all the servlets in webapps/examples/ are working fine.But if I create a new directory below webapps like c:\jakart1.1\webapps\myapp and try to see my own servlets in the browser,I get the famous 404 error "resource not available".
THese are the directories I have:
c:\jakart1.1\webapps\myapp\images
c:\jakart1.1\webapps\myapp\jsp
c:\jakart1.1\webapps\myapp\root
c:\jakart1.1\webapps\myapp\servlets
c:\jakart1.1\webapps\myapp\WEB-INF
c:\jakart1.1\webapps\myapp\WEB-INF\classes
c:\jakart1.1\webapps\myapp\WEB-INF\jsp
c:\jakart1.1\webapps\myapp\WEB-INF\web.xml
Also in web.xml I have the following lines:
<servlet>
<servlet-name>
servletToJsp
</servlet-name>
<servlet-class>
servletToJsp
</servlet-class>
</servlet>
DO I need to also have /examples" in the path.
I need to know if there is something I need to change in server.xml.I have changed it to
<Context path="/myapp" docBase="myapp" debug="0"
reloadable="true" crossContext="true">
Is there anything else needed to be done?In any other file?I know the problem is in between the mapping of the url and the directory myapp.How do I specify for url to look for myapp directory.
Please help!!!!
Thanks

Answer 1

Begging your pardon, but by your own description of the solution to your problem, it sounds as if your configuration was exactly the problem - it had absolutely nothing to do with the servlet(s). 404 errors mean that the client request isn't mapping to an available server resource. That's a configuration problem with the server.
By your admission, your problem had nothing to do with servlets - it was a container configuration issue, and a "looking for the wrong URL" issue (which I should point out nobody in the forums could have detected - you didn't offer the URL you were trying to use). You didn't have the web.xml or the associated class files properly deployed. That's a configuration issue, albeit one which applies fairly generically to all containers.
Also - you say that 404 errors are common, and therefore belong in this forum. I disagree - as I pointed out above, 404 errors are container configuration errors, they are not servlet programming problems. Further, there are tons of servlet containers, and you seem to be making the assumption that Tomcat is the only one. As you mentioned yourself - "TO solve it we need to know the exact working of servlets in tomcat and the directory structure." Well, you're right, you do need to know those things. However, those are tomcat configuration issues, not servlet issues.
Finally - you mentioned that you had to have both the class and java files deployed to the container? Are you sure that you didn't just need the class files? I confess that I'm no Tomcat expert, but I've never encountered a container which required the original source files to be deployed along side the compiled class files...