Andy Chase

Once you've installed Tomcat on your Panther machine, you may be looking for an application to deploy with it. In my case, I'm trying to kill two birds with one stone - one, start mucking around with JSP and Java, and two, establish a new weblog-type site dedicated to my homebrewing exploits.

Granted, nobody is going to be able to browse such a site if it's living on my PowerBook, but until such time as I have someplace to host it will have to do.

After a failed attempt at installing OpenCMS, which was probably way more CMS than I need anyway, I found Roller and set up a cron job to begin downloading the source and tools at 5:00 AM, so it would be ready by the time I got up. (Dial-up sucks.)

It built without a flaw, but after following the installation guide I restarted Tomcat, and tried to access Roller via my browser, and received an Exception.

What fixed it in my case was moving the context data out of the /Library/Tomcat/conf/server.xml file and into its own file at /Library/Tomcat/conf/Catalina/localhost/roller.xml. (Assuming you're running Tomcat 5, and that it's installed at /Library/Tomcat.)

Works like a charm.