ServletContextListener fails - how to make app unavailable?

[Sasha Borodin <sa...@whoissasha.com>]

I've tried searching for this issue in the tomcat-user archives; I found
general theory but not how to implement it.  Specifically:

If there's a problem within contextIntitialized(), I would want the app to
return HTTP 500 or something.  But the ServletContextListener interface does
not declare any Exceptions thrown.  Thus I can't declare any in my subclass.
Yet if I try to just catch an Exception, log, and rethrow a general
ServletException, I can't compile cause ("must handle or declare...").

So how do I notify Tomcat that there's a problem, and that the context
should be made unavailable?

Thanks,

-Sasha