Tomcat won't "find" my servlet

Question

After an afternoon of studying various documentation and downloading stuff, I managed to get the Java SDK and Tomcat running. I've hit a problem though (aside from Tomcat not starting up as described in the documentation - I could not find startup.sh at all, but I found an executable in /usr/bin that seemed to do the job quite nicely). I put a compiled servlet (a hello world thing copied from an O'Reilly book) in the right place, started Tomcat and accessed http://localhost:8080/servlet/HelloWorld . I got this error:
HTTP Status 404 - /servlet/HelloWorld
type Status report
message /servlet/HelloWorld
description The requested resource (/servlet/HelloWorld) is not available.
Apache Tomcat/4.1
I would be grateful if anyone would tell me what I am doing wrong.
Thanks :)

Answer 1

I have had similar problems and what I found was pretty annoying feature of Tomcat, that is I was using log4j in my servlet but I didn�t put log4j.jat in {context}\WEB-INF\lib folder. Tomcat didn�t indicate anything related to the missing 3-third party library, instead it was complaining about some EOFException.
Another thing to look for is making sure that the URL specified in browser matches your web.xml mapping that is:
http::/localhost/servlet/blah should have corresponding item in web.xml file like this:
<servlet>
<servlet-name>Servlet_Blah</servlet-name>
<display-name>Servlet Blah</display-name>
<description>Default configuration created for servlet.</description>
<servlet-class>BlahServlet</servlet-class>
</servlet>
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>Servlet_Blah</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/servlet/blah</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>
Janusz