I noticed this earlier, but now I'm wondering. "Global web.xml not found."
You might want to research that.
Tomcat has a clever way to deal with URLs that have no explicit handler in a webapp. For example, directory listing and fetching images and other static content. It does that by using a built-in "default servlet" which contains the code that constructs the index pages and copies image resources to the response stream (with appropriate headers). A default
servlet implies a default web.xml, so maybe there's something missing here. As I recall, in earlier versions of Tomcat, the default servlet was assigned from something in the Tomcat "conf" directory, and while I'm too lazy to check, it could have been an actual default web.xml file.
Yes, I know, recent enhancements have made it possible to code webapps that "don't have" a web.xml file, but web.xml is simply a spec file that gets digested into a collection of application resources, including the sub-URL routings, the security templates and so forth. Just because you can now do most of this stuff via annotations doesn't mean that the web.xml equivalent structure has gone away.