Cannot access servlet in tomcat4

Question

I'm a newbie to server side java. Please guide me.
Installed Apache2 and Tomcat4 in Win2K. The installation seems OK because the index pages of both apache and tomcat appear when accessed as localhost on browser.
I wrote (in fact, copied from a tutorial) a servlet, compiled and placed it at
tomcat_root\webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\classes as suggested in the tutorial.
But it doesn't work when I access as:
http://localhost:8080/servlet/MyServlet
It reports a HTTP Status 404 error.
By the way, when I run it as an example servlet it works fine. By that I mean I placed it inside the pre-existing tomcat_root\webapps\examples\WEB-INF\classes folder and ran as http://localhost:8080/examples/servlet/MyServlet
My another puzzle is why the servlet needs to be accessed that way. I don't see any 'servlet' folder anywhere under my Tomcat installation, but it seems to be a must at the URL calling the servlet.
Thank you.

Answer 1

Take a look at the web.xml files, both in conf and in WEB-INF, you'll learn that the /servlet/ url is mapped to the invoker that tries to find your classes, but is bad to have active in production.
Basically, you need to tell tomcat, through your web.xml the mapping between url (you may choose something other that servlet) and your actual servlets.
Patrick