Why is tomcat looking for JSF classes?

Question

I am trying to get my development environment up and running, and I am having trouble with Tomcat trying to load JSF classes for some reason. My application does not use JSF; in fact, I haven't even deployed my application to tomcat yet. I am getting a number of stack traces in the startup logs and I cannot load the default tomcat homepage when I try to open http://localhost:8080 (I just get the tomcat 404 page).

Here is what the first stack trace is:

SEVERE: Error configuring application listener of class com.sun.faces.util.ReflectionUtils$ReflectionUtilsListener
java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: com.sun.faces.util.ReflectionUtils$ReflectionUtilsListener
    at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.loadClass(WebappClassLoader.java:1386)
    at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.loadClass(WebappClassLoader.java:1232)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.listenerStart(StandardContext.java:3712)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.start(StandardContext.java:4216)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChildInternal(ContainerBase.java:760)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.addChild(ContainerBase.java:740)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.addChild(StandardHost.java:544)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployDescriptor(HostConfig.java:626)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployDescriptors(HostConfig.java:553)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.deployApps(HostConfig.java:488)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.start(HostConfig.java:1150)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.HostConfig.lifecycleEvent(HostConfig.java:311)
    at org.apache.catalina.util.LifecycleSupport.fireLifecycleEvent(LifecycleSupport.java:120)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.start(ContainerBase.java:1022)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHost.start(StandardHost.java:736)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.start(ContainerBase.java:1014)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngine.start(StandardEngine.java:443)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardService.start(StandardService.java:448)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardServer.start(StandardServer.java:700)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.Catalina.start(Catalina.java:552)
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke0(Native Method)
    at sun.reflect.NativeMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(NativeMethodAccessorImpl.java:39)
    at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.java:25)
    at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:324)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.start(Bootstrap.java:295)
    at org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:433)

I also get similar stack traces for the following other classes:

com.sun.faces.config.ConfigureListener
com.sun.faces.application.WebappLifecycleListener

I'm not sure if this is relevant, but I am running Tomcat 5.5.27 with the 1.4 compatibility pack installed, with Java 1.4.2, on Mas OS 10.5.

Thanks for any ideas!

EDIT: It seems that each of the default applications that come with Tomcat (host-manager, balancer, tomcat-docs, jsp-examples, etc) was relying on these JSF classes. I removed these default applications, and everything seems to be working.

So, my question is now: Why does tomcat come with applications that don't include their dependencies, and what do I need to do to make those default applicaitons work?

Answer 1

Is your tomcat installation totally clean, or is it one you have inherited?

Check if the webapps contains existing wars/directories which may be referencing JSF classes?

UPDATE: Ah -- I see you found this was the case :-)

Not sure why tomcat doesn't include all its dependencies. Perhaps you downloaded a developer release instead of a stable one?

Answer 2

You might have to clean the Tomcat work directory. See this article for nmore information