Just thought I would let people know what I wound up doing. I decided to try installing and working with tomcat rather than Orion. My reasons? I wanted to keep working with Java 5 and, more important, some projects at my company use tomcat and I thought gaining experience with tomcat might be more useful to me than experience with Orion.
So, how did my tomcat installation/configuration work? Well, I got tomcat installed and I can use it for my own servlets. I've submitted assignment servlets-1 for nitpicking and I've also done servlets-2. So, I was successful. Was installing/configuring tomcat difficult? It was a bit of a hassle and it did take me a bit of time. For this reason I'll post some information on what I did and learned in the outside case that another cattledrive student decides to use tomcat.
0: I am using Java 5 with Windows XP so what I write may not be applicable to folks using older versions of Java and different OS's.
1: I went to the tomcat sites:
http://tomcat.apache.org/ http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/setup.html and downloaded the exe version of tomcat 5.5 for Windows. I chose the exe file because the Java 2 book said that was what should be downloaded for Windows.
I goggled to figure out how to configure tomcat for servlets. I configured tomcat. And I tried to run tomcat. And I tried to run tomcat. I spent some hours on this and couldn't get tomcat to work with my servlets. It did work with the tomcat example servlets and it did work with some servlets I installed from some war file. But when I tried to get my servlets running I kept getting an error message. After gooling the error messages, I ultimately learned (from one of the javaranch newsgroups!) that the windows exe version of tomcat seems (seemed?) to have a problem.
2: I then went back to the tomcat sites and downloaded the zip version of tomcat for windows. I installed and configured it, and with a little work tomcat actually worked for the example servlets and for my servlets.
3: Configuring tomcat is not hard. Learning how to configure tomcat can take some time. I did not find the official tomcat sites to be very useful. They are slanted towards people who are experts in configuring servlet containers, and they have lots (and lots) of information on lots of configurable values. For novices like me the site provided way more information than I could easily plow through to get simple servlets working. The sites that I did find useful are:
http://www.coreservlets.com/Apache-Tomcat-Tutorial/#Configure-Tomcat http://www.murach.com/dloads/jsps/jsps_tomcat-5.5.pdf The coreservlets site was particularly useful, and I would recommend using its installation/configuration instructions.