web.xml
Thursday night I was working on making some Java/JSP/Servlet stuff work and it looked fine, I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working. As usually happens with me, after I have exausted my usual troubleshooting ideas, I just start blindly trying new things. This has actually worked out for me on several occassions.
Basically it was a simple login page that had a servlet as the action for the form, the servlet validated the input and upon sucess dumped you to the page you needed. But it kept 404′ing on me.
I went to bed without it working.
In the morning I was trying various things which were all guesses (this happens because I don’t know what I am doing half the time and I just want to get it to work). finally I put a forward slash in the url pattern of the servlet mapping. Bang, it worked. Frustrating.