Well after getting zero feedback I managed to sort my own problem out. <sarcasm> thanks </sarcasm>
You guys might think it was simple but with the extreme lack of documentation for slide beginners I have been toiling over this for nearly 2 weeks on and off. I will reiterate it here for the sake of others searching the archives in vain in the future. By the way, I repeatedly came across people who had the same problems as I did, and no-one answered their pleas either. I'm not really interested in why so don't bother trying to tell me off! There may or may not be a good reason for it but I always think that forums are a last resort for driven individuals who like to sort problems out themselves before asking for help. I'm also not interested in forum pecking orders, if I have a problem and I am stuck, I have tried my best and tried to sort it myself endlessly (I will remember the zero-hit Google searches for Slide errors for a long time to come.. They haunt my dreams ;o) ) then I think my problem is valid and I don't care what anyone thinks to the contrary (whilst casually flicking 'next' to answer a 'proper' query). Anyway enough rant. Basically, if you are having trouble starting Slide and Tomcat (mysterious NullPointerExceptions with no root cause; ServletExceptions with no meaningful reason; complaints of ObjectNotFoundException at /actions and suchlike), despite having followed the 'instructions', then you may have done too much! I ignored chunks of the instructions, and that was the only way I got it all to work: 1) Standard install Tomcat 2) Copy slide.war, slide-admin.war and slide-doc.war to CATALINA_HOME/webapps/ 3) Start Tomcat using services > start (sorry, I am windows at the mo) - this for some reason is the only way I could get slide to Tomcat to start the logger before it falls over on problematic startup. At least then you can see the error messages in CATALINA_HOME/logs/ 4) Stop Tomcat. 5) Delete all your log files. 6) DO NOT copy any JAR files from your slide download! The reason you are having trouble is PURELY because of duplicated JAR files, and following the instructions to do so (e.g. in Tomcat HOWTO on apache Jakarta site) actually made my setup fail! 7) Remove all the JARs from CATALINA_HOME/webapps/slide/lib and put them in CATALINA_HOME/common/lib/ so that the admin webapp can share them. If you don't do this then you will be able to run slide but not slide-admin, and you will get the SlideToken problem. 8) Forget messing around creating org/apache/slide/slide.properties in CATALINA_HOME/common/classes (you can if you really want to but it gave me problems with the admin webapp) - just cut Domain.xml out of CATALINA_HOME/webapps/slide/ and put it in CATALINA_HOME/bin/ AND make sure you start Tomcat using the shortcut (not services > start) after editing the shortcut properties to ensure that Tomcat 'starts in' CATALINA_HOME/bin/ 9) Check the startup window and the logs BUT I reckon it should all be sweet ;o) >From then on, change CATALINA_HOME/webapps/slide/WEB-INF/web.xml and CATALINA_HOME/conf/server.xml to your hearts content because at least now you know it works eh? Please feel free to edit the list (or ignore it as appropriate) as it's not a decree, and I am FAR from an expert otherwise all of this would never have come to pass. If I have stepped on anyone's toes then I'm not really bothered, but I hope there are good people in here who can understand the plight of the Slide Beginner (you were ALL one once!). Kind Regards stuart
