Tomcat and directories

I run into a nasty issue the other day with “alike” directories in my web application.

That is, I had a copy of a “WEB-INF” directory called “WEB-INF–“. While my web application did not bother with copy of the WEB-INF directory, Tomcat threw all kinds of errors in the catalina.out log file. Also, I had some issues with Tomcat restarting and strange Java error messages, like:

Java.lang.NullPointerException
com.nary.util.Localization.convertCharSetToCharEncoding(Unknown Source)
com.naryx.tagfusion.cfm.engine.cfEngine.getDefaultEncoding(Unknown Source)
com.naryx.tagfusion.cfm.engine.cfFormData.(Unknown Source)
com.naryx.tagfusion.cfm.engine.cfFormData.(Unknown Source)
com.naryx.tagfusion.cfm.engine.variableStore.(Unknown Source)
com.naryx.tagfusion.cfm.engine.cfSession.(Unknown Source)
com.naryx.tagfusion.cfm.engine.cfEngine.service(Unknown Source)
com.naryx.tagfusion.cfm.cfServlet.service(Unknown Source)
javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:717)

After browsing the log files, I saw that Tomcat tried to read the directory and threw a bunch of critical errors while reading those copied directories. I guess, Tomcat got totally confused and tried to overload libraries.

Lesson learned; Never have any copy of the WEB-INF folder within the web application again.