Question

I have a web project that has a \META-INF\services\javax.servlet.ServletContainerInitializer file with its content pointing to the fully qualified name of a class that implements the ServletContainerInitializer interface. I basically followed the example given here: http://nullhaus.com/2011/03/using-servlets-3-0-servletcontainerinitializer/

I put debug lines in my class that implements the ServletContainerInitializer interface and it never makes it there. Not even the default constructor…

My application folder structure is as follows:

\MyApp
      \META-INF\services\javax.servlet.ServletContainerInitializer
      \WEB-INF\classes\
                 ... [list of classes and packages go here]

Any ideas what I need to check for??

Note 1: My Tomcat publishes from an exploded external folder that contains my application

Note 2: I started my Tomcat from Eclipse – if that makes a difference!

Answer 1

Well, I think that you’ll need to wrap your initializer class (and it’s services-related META-INF directory) into a separate *.jar and put it in the WEB-INF/lib.

This is a JAR service, so I guess it could have something to do with problems with discovering services in a *.war file. Moreover, it doesn’t even help if you put your META-INF directory inside WEB-INF/classes and set unpackWAR=false in your Tomcat’s server.xml.

HTH.