Maven / Tomcat issue with Servlet jar

Guys,

I have an issue with offending jar file "servlet.class" in my web application. My web application is built using Maven and deployed to tomcat 5.x.x. I have a dependency on my Maven pom.xml for the servlet api as below,

But when I build it and deploy it to Tomcat, I get the following error message...

INFO: validateJarFile(C:\Programme\apache-tomcat-5.5.28\webapps\iqeeditor\WEB-IN
F\lib\servlet-api-2.4.jar) - jar not loaded. See Servlet Spec 2.3, section 9.7.2
. Offending class: javax/servlet/Servlet.class
log4j:WARN No appenders could be found for logger (org.apache.commons.digester.D
igester.sax).
log4j:WARN Please initialize the log4j system properly.
21.10.2009 11:44:19 org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext start
SCHWERWIEGEND: Error listenerStart
21.10.2009 11:44:19 org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext start
SCHWERWIEGEND: Context [/iqeeditor] startup failed due to previous errors
21.10.2009 11:44:21 org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader validateJarFile

INFO: validateJarFile(C:\Programme\apache-tomcat-5.5.28\webapps\multipurposeedit
or\WEB-INF\lib\servlet-api-2.4.jar) - jar not loaded. See Servlet Spec 2.3, sect
ion 9.7.2. Offending class: javax/servlet/Servlet.class
log4j:WARN No appenders could be found for logger (org.apache.commons.digester.D
igester.sax).
log4j:WARN Please initialize the log4j system properly.
21.10.2009 11:44:22 org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11BaseProtocol start
INFO: Starting Coyote HTTP/1.1 on http-8080
21.10.2009 11:44:22 org.apache.jk.common.ChannelSocket init
INFO: JK: ajp13 listening on /0.0.0.0:8009
21.10.2009 11:44:22 org.apache.jk.server.JkMain start
INFO: Jk running ID=0 time=0/62  config=null
21.10.2009 11:44:22 org.apache.catalina.storeconfig.StoreLoader load
INFO: Find registry server-registry.xml at classpath resource
21.10.2009 11:44:22 org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina start
INFO: Server startup in 11339 ms

I made the scope to provided in my Maven dependency declaration, but even after that I get the same problem.

Make sure you delete any stale copies of the deployed servlet. Specifically, remove both the WAR and the exploded WAR from your TOMCAT_HOME/webapps directory and remove TOMCAT_HOME/work/Catalina/localhost/xxxxx, where "xxxxx" is the WAR's name.

The scope "provided" is correct for JARs like the servlet-api.jar that are provided by the runtime and not bundled as part of the deployable unit, so it's almost certain that you just have some leftover stuff from before you fixed that.

Yes, I did that and seems to work now.

Just deleted the exploded war and it started to work!

One of the more irritating features of Tomcat is that if you copy a WAR into the webapps directory and Tomcat explodes it, that's the WAR it's going to use, even if you replace the original ".war" file with a newer version. So as part of my deployment process I make it a practice to clean house.

Thanks for the suggestion. I guess most of the web / app servers require a clean deployment to make use of the latest files.