Question

My application works fine on the dev server but when I upload it fails to start and I get the following exception in the logs: java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/apache/jasper/runtime/JspSourceDependent. So far it seems to be related to the jsp dependencies declared in my app which are:

    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
        <artifactId>servlet-api</artifactId>
        <version>2.5</version>
        <scope>provided</scope>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.servlet.jsp</groupId>
        <artifactId>jsp-api</artifactId>
        <version>2.1</version>
        <scope>provided</scope>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.servlet</groupId>
        <artifactId>jstl</artifactId>
        <version>1.2</version>
        <scope>provided</scope>
    </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>javax.el</groupId>
        <artifactId>el-api</artifactId>
        <version>2.2</version>
        <scope>provided</scope>
    </dependency>

I am missing something obvious here, and why does the app work fine in the dev environment but fail to start up in the production environment?

Answer 1

The exception was due to the pre-compilation of JSPs using the jspc-maven-plugin which left tomcat-specific code in the pre-compiled classes. The solution was to remove the plugin from the pom and let appcfg do the pre-compiling before uploading.