the brutal hands of Tomcat

Started my INTRA work placement with a software company in the city centre on Monday, where we were introduced to some new and cool concepts common in enterprise-level software development nowadays, including servlets/jsp, Spring, Hibernate and the extreme programming philosophy and practices.

Since we're still just newbies, we were playing around with getting servlets running in Tomcat today, but it turned out to be very unforgiving for novices.

I quickly made the following two mistakes:

• Didn't enclose the 'true' parameter in inverted commas - I had <context reloading=true> instead of <context reloading="true">. This error took about 40 minutes to track down; silly of me to not notice the error was being logged for over half an hour of head scratching...
• Put my servlet and web.xml deployment descriptor in a directory named WEB_INF instead of WEB-INF... this one cost me 2 hours. Brown paper bag bug... and so frustrating! Just goes to show; even when it feels like a causeless bug, it's almost invariably your fault... :P

Frustrating... let this be a lesson to ye!