404 - Servlet FrontController is not available

[Juhan Voolaid]

Hello

I'm very new to struts and just trying my first struts program. It is the famous HFSJ beerapp example.
So I have:
form.jsp (directs to SelectBeer.do)
result.jsp
test.model.BeerExpert.class
test.web.BeerSelectAction.class
test.web.BeerSelectForm.class

Problem is when I submit the form I get to http://localhost/~juhan/SelectBeer.do and I see error 404 - Servlet FrontController is not available

I have copied to my WEB-INF/lib/ files:
commons-beanutils.jar
commons-digester.jar
struts.jar

I belive the problem may be in my web.xml file or maybe struts-config.xml file that are in my WEB-INF/ directory.

web.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<web-app xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee"
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd"
        version="2.4">
 
    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>FrontController</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>org.apache.struts.action.ActionServlet</servlet-class>
 
        <init-param>
            <param-name>config</param-name>
            <param-value>/WEB-INF/struts-config.xml</param-value>
        </init-param>
 
        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>
 

    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>FrontController</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>*.do</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>
</web-app>

And here is struts-config.xml

?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
 
<!DOCTYPE struts-config
  PUBLIC "-//Apache Software Foundation//DTD Struts Configuration 1.1//EN"
  "http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/dtds/struts-config_1_1.dtd">
 
<struts-config>
 
    <form-beans>
        <form-bean name="selectBeerForm" type="test.web.SelectBeerForm" />
    </form-beans>
 

    <action-mappings>
        <action
            path="/SelectBeer"
            type="test.web.BeerSelectAction"
            name="selectBeerForm"
            scope="request"
            validate="true"
            input="/form.jsp">
            <forward name="show_results" path="/result.jsp"/>
        </action>
    </action-mappings>
    <!-- dunno -->
    <message-resources parameter="ApplicationResources" null="false">
</struts-config>
 

What does it really mean FrontController is not available? Do I have to deploy it in some special way. I simply restarted the tomcat.

[Allen Bandela]

I have the same problem. Can anybody help please?

[Merrill Higginson]

Allen,

I'm not sure what the problem with your application is, since you didn't provide us with any details, but here's what I think is the problem with the original post:

I have copied to my WEB-INF/lib/ files:
commons-beanutils.jar
commons-digester.jar
struts.jar

These jar files are not enough. All the jar files in the /lib directory of the unzipped download file must be copied to your WEB-INF/lib directory.

This error is an indication that the Struts ActionServlet did not initialize properly. The real error is logged to the tomcat log files when the application starts up. You can find these log files in the <tomcat root>/logs directory. Look for the ones with the most recent dates.

[Conor Williams]

i'm probably a bit late to help here, but I modified catalina.bat and added the jars in the CLASSPATH there.

set CLASSPATH=c:\struts1CON\struts-core-1.3.10.jar;c:\struts1CON\commons-beanutils-1.8.0.jar;c:\struts1CON\commons-chain-1.2.jar;c:\struts1CON\commons-digester-1.8.jar;c:\struts1CON\struts-taglib-1.3.10.jar;c:\apache-tomcat-7.0.19-windows-x86\apache-tomcat-7.0.19\lib\servlet-api.jar;c:\apache-tomcat-7.0.19-windows-x86\apache-tomcat-7.0.19\webapps\conor1\WEB-INF\classes;c:\struts1CON\commons-logging-1.0.4.jar

struts v1.3.10

worked a peach - happy halloween!