tomcat not compiling WEB-INF/libs?

Question

[irrev] I keep making guesses and asking accordingly as to what's wrong here, so take that under consideration. The project I'm working on is setting up a web application, the source of which was sent to us by a chinese company as a portal for the hardware we're buying from them, so a language and time-zone barrier prevents effective communication with the original developer. Furthermore, I haven't built a web application before, so this is me stumbling through unfamiliar territory. [/irrev]

My root problem appears to be that the library files in WEB-INF/lib aren't being accessed. The static content loads alright, but (1) a captcha image, which I found from the web.xml page is created by a .jar, doesn't load, and (2) the class that connects to the SQL database which contains login and password information, doesn't do what it's supposed to: the result when searching by username always yields nothing.

Now as to the solution: I have tried to reconstruct these classes, but I know far too little about what it's expected to do (presumably the far more things than I can see depend on these classes). I got the idea that the source files could simply be loaded into tomcat and deployed, but nevertheless I have tried to open them in NetBeans and compile them there...this too didn't work. I fear this is far too general a question but I'm running out of options. What does this behavior indicate to you, and what should be my next step?

Answer 1

The classes within WEB-INF/lib are already compiled and available to the web application to be served.

In addition to log4j mentioned in comments above, once you get a hang of the application flow, I'd also suggest you decompile some of the classes for a better look. Use JAD or decafe.

This will give you a fair view of which class calls which. Though this wont be an exact match for the orginal source code.

You'll have to track from the JSP or servlet at the front end down to the logic which calls the database. You can then load these decompiled classes into your IDE.

Havign said that, this is only going to help tracing through the problem. You cant make and test any fixes yourself without the original source to build and deploy as a web app - so are you intending to communicate your findings back to the developers and get them to fix?