I noticed lots of people having struts problems with this symptom. >From what I have seen of the struts startup, many startup problems will cause this to be the first symptom for the example app. This kind of "one error for all situations" makes diagnosis difficult.
Looking in the log may clarify the problem, but I noticed that some of the problems do not produce obvious log entries (errors are swallowed). I have some suggestions that struts (and web apps generally) can use to help make it easier to debug installation and other similar startup problems. 1) Don't just swallow errors without a clear error log entry. E.g., getServletContext().getResourceAsStream(config) just swallows security exceptions. Not good. It does return a null, but this is not enough to identify the problem. 2) keep some type of structure in which some meaningful message can be sent to the application interface. For example, initialization and other code can put some indication of the problem in an "Errors" structure. When the user makes a query the application (or struts infrastructure) can check to see if "Errors" is non-empty and display a special error page which will provide better help in diagnosing the problem. 3) install and config problems can be more easily diagnosed by explicitly checking for necessary pre-conditions (e.g., file access, network access, etc.) and generating specific errors. This could be run separately or optionally as part of init. Frank Lawlor Athens Group, Inc. (512) 345-0600 x151 Athens Group, an employee-owned consulting firm integrating technology strategy and software solutions. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
