Unfound Package Error Message

[Peter Joanes <pj...@hotmail.com>]

Hello,

I have a server running tomcat 4.0 beta 7.
I put on it an application that sends email, so mail.jar is in the 
WEB-INF/lib directory.
I got a very unuseful error message when accessing the relevant JSP:

Root Cause:
java.lang.NumberFormatException:  Could not find package named
	at java.lang.Throwable.(Throwable.java:96)
	at java.lang.Exception.(Exception.java:44)
	at java.lang.RuntimeException.(RuntimeException.java:49)
etc......

The problem is that to find out what was wrong I had to move the application 
to my desktop PC which is running tomcat 4.0 beta 6.
This produced a far superior error message that made it clear that I had 
forgotten to put activation.jar into the WEB-INF/lib directory (required for 
javamail).

If you want any more detail on these messages get back to me. I would be very 
grateful if future tomcat 4s can revert to helpful error messages in this 
situation.

Regards,
Peter Joanes
pjoanes@hotmail.com