I stumbled on what I think is a small difference in Tomcat's behaviour from the Servlet spec. Looking at the code, it seems to affect both Tomcat 4 and 5.
In short, the servlet specs (2.3 and 2.4) says that a servlet with <load-on-startup> value set to 0 should load before those with values of 1 or higher, but Tomcat loads 1+ first, and 0 last. "The load-on-startup element indicates that this servlet should be loaded (instantiated and have its init() called) on the startup of the web application. The optional contents of these element must be an integer indicating the order in which the servlet should be loaded. If the value is a negative integer, or the element is not present, the container is free to load the servlet whenever it chooses. If the value is a positive integer or 0, the container must load and initialize the servlet as the application is deployed. The container must guarantee that servlets marked with lower integers are loaded before servlets marked with higher integers. The container may choose the order of loading of servlets with the same load-on-start-up value." Here's the first part of loadOnStartup(Container[]). This code is identical in Tomcat 4.x (StandardContext.java:3398) and 5.x (StandardContext.java:3930). public void loadOnStartup(Container children[]) { // Collect "load on startup" servlets that need to be initialized TreeMap map = new TreeMap(); for (int i = 0; i < children.length; i++) { Wrapper wrapper = (Wrapper) children[i]; int loadOnStartup = wrapper.getLoadOnStartup(); if (loadOnStartup < 0) continue; if (loadOnStartup == 0) // Arbitrarily put them last loadOnStartup = Integer.MAX_VALUE; Integer key = new Integer(loadOnStartup); ArrayList list = (ArrayList) map.get(key); if (list == null) { list = new ArrayList(); map.put(key, list); } list.add(wrapper); } ... It appears the problem would be solved by deleting the lines that read: if (loadOnStartup == 0) // Arbitrarily put them last loadOnStartup = Integer.MAX_VALUE; Michael -- Michael Prescott Ingenura Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] (416) 686-8576 PGP Public Key: http://www.ingenura.com/keys/MichaelPrescott.asc --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]