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From: "Stephen Charles Huey" <stephenhuey@alumni.rice.edu>
To: tomcat-user@jakarta.apache.org
Date: Mon, 08 Sep 2003 12:31:54 -0600
Subject: Tomcat exception report I don't understand
Message-Id: <20030908183154.F0D3C7714B@smtp.us2.messagingengine.com>

We have a web app on a server that a contractor developed remotely using
JBuilder 7 Enterprise, and I'm a new guy in the office who's trying to
modify some of our site code on a dev laptop using JBuilder 9 Personal
and Tomcat 4, version 1.1 (the same as what's on the server).  I took
great pains to make sure my localhost configuration matched and that as
much as possible, locations and such wouldn't be hardcoded (and therefore
machine-dependent).  Last night was the first time I've tried to roll new
code changes by simply dropping a JBuilder-built JAR file into Tomcat's
common\lib and then dropping my updated JSP pages into their respective
places.  There are actually two semi-related webapps (in two different
directories in Tomcat's webapps\ directory) that both use common code in
my site's JAR file.  When I tried logging into the first app, it failed,
and I'll include part of the page I got down below.  

To get into the second app, you have to login just as you do for the
first app, but if you're already logged into the first app, you can
simply browse to the second one (e.g. highlight that part of the URL and
replace it with the appropriate directory name).  And when I did that,
the second app worked fine!  So, I know that at least a large part of my
JAR code works, at least with the second app (and hence there should be
no problem there).  Also, I didn't change the login page, so it can't be
that (but I know it's probably JAR file code that that page eventually
accesses, since it calls some bean methods to set things up).  

I did find one notable difference between the Tomcat directories on the
two machines.  On my machine, I have two extra JAR files in Tomcat's
common\lib directory:  xercesImpl.jar and xmlParserAPIs.jar

I've tried Googling a bit, but I'm still not really sure what these do or
where they came from (did I get them when I downloaded Tomcat?...if so,
why aren't they on the other machine if it's the same version of
Tomcat?), but at least one of them seems related to my problem since
xerces is mentioned when Tomcat throws up.  I did check the two
xerces.jar files, and they have the same modification timestamps (Oct 8,
2002), so I assume they're probably the same version!  

Here is what appears directly under "root cause" on the Exception Report:

javax.servlet.ServletException:
org/apache/xerces/parsers/AbstractSAXParser
	at org.apache.jasper.runtime.PageContextImpl.handlePageException(PageContextImpl.java:536)
	at org.apache.jsp.Login_jsp._jspService(Login_jsp.java:150)
	at org.apache.jasper.runtime.HttpJspBase.service(HttpJspBase.java:137)
	at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:853)


To reiterate...I could apparently log into my site since I was already
logged in when I tried to access the second app, but then something else
beyond that didn't work on the first app.  I would appreciate any
suggestions as to what the problem could be.  I'm wondering if those
extra JAR files might be picked up by the compiler and so confuse things.
 I would test that right now, but I can't retry my dev site on the
production server until late tonight.  We really needed to get these new
changes rolled last night, so that's why I'm doing what I can today to
figure out what the problem could be before I try to roll again with only
blind guesswork.  

Thanks for any help,
Stephen