Spring's ContextLoaderListener fails to start in Tomcat

[James Adams]

I have a Spring MVC web application which no longer starts successfully on Tomcat (I have come back to this code after a couple of months, it ran OK before). The trouble seems to be with the ContextLoaderListener which I have specified in the web.xml.

I have the following in my web.xml

    <listener>
        <listener-class>
            org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener
        </listener-class>
    </listener>

When I have the above in my web.xml I get an error when starting the web application, and the only error message I can find in Tomcat tells me this:


SEVERE: Error listenerStart


If I have the above commented out then the web application starts fine when I restart Tomcat.

I do have the spring-1.2.3.jar in my webapp's WEB-INF/lib directory, so the ContextLoaderListener class should be found OK. I can't think of where else to look for clues, can anyone turn on the light for me?

I am using the latest Tomcat and Spring 1.2.3.

Thanks in advance for any insight!


--James