STS Web-Services Tutorial Project doesn't find embedded Tomcat server

[arick]

When I try to follow the tutorial on Spring Web-Services, at the final step, when STS is supposed to start the tcServer, it says that it needs to download a new installation of Tomcat. When I grant it permission, it flashes a series of screens too quickly to follow, then proceeds to pretend that everything is fine. But when I go to the final step and actually try to run the client, it failed.
I have tried a number of steps, including different operating systems and JDK's etc. I have it down to a fairly clean error:

The Tomcat installation directory is not valid. It is missing expected file or folder lib/jasper-el.jar.

Needless to say, the next step "Create the Client", fails with a "Not Found [404]" error from the connection attempt to the server.

Two key steps seemed to be critical to get me this far.
(1) Ensure that the path to the JDK and to the Spring install do not contain any spaces,
(2) Have the server already running when you get to the step "Run the Server".

I am not confident that I am approaching this correctly.
1) Why would the tutorial have a step that says "Run the Server", when the reader is expected to have already started the server independently of the tutorial?
2) Why would the STS not provide a critical jar file?

Any suggestions?

[Martin Lippert]

Hi!

Its hard to say what is exactly going wrong here, but let me try to analyse this in a step-by-step approach...

Usually, when you download the full STS distribution, it comes with a ready-to-use tc Server installation. I guess you downloaded that full distribution (and not added STS to an existing Eclipse via update sites), right? If that is the case, did you install STS into a DIFFERENT LOCATION than "Program Files", if you are running on Windows? I am just asking because this is a common problem that causes problems running tc Server.

Do you see the tc Server instance in the "Servers" view? And can you start it from there (maybe without any apps deployed)?

-Martin

[arick]

I downloaded the entire STS distribution, and it does come with the embedded tcServer. The embedded tcServer is visible in the project navigation window.

It became apparent from the log files, that both the JDK and the STS stack had to be located in a directory without any spaces, which I did on the last pass. (Hence the comment above about "(1) Ensure that the path to the JDK and to the Spring install do not contain any spaces,"

I am able to start the tcServer. It is when I already have the tcServer running, and I attempt to do the step "Run the Server", that I get the error message about missing the "jasper-el.jar" file.

On this last pass, I dis-installed every JRE and JDK, and I removed the STS that was previously installed. I deleted the entire workspace. This was just to be sure that I didn't have any linger path issues.

Then I re-installed the JDK/JRE 6.0_31 in C:\Java. I installed the STS and workspace in a directory with no spaces. So far, no luck.

[Martin Lippert]

I have moved this thread to the Web Services forum, maybe here is someone who can help... Sorry for not being more helpful at the moment...

-Martin

[boris.nebosenko]

There is apache-tomcat-6.0 folder in the springsource installation directory. In-spite of complete installation this folder was empty. So I have copied tomcat 6.0.33 to this folder and all the tutorials works well after this. No servers should be running. Tutorial creates "Apache Tomcat v6.0" and starts it automatically on the "Start Demo Application" step.

[arick]

It turns out that the download application doesn't link the server and project in Eclipse. Since vFabric has its own version of Tomcat, I am guessing that the standard Tomcat installation was nixed, but nobody bother to fix the link to point to the VMWare vFabric tc Server Developer Edition v2.6.-config that comes with STS.
So there are two options:
1) Add the apache-tomcat-6.0 to the installation folder, as Boris did above.
2) Do a right-click on the ws-tutorial project and 'Publish' it to the vFabric server.