Strange bugs with servlet loading

[Adam Ierymenko <ap...@relaymail.net>]

There appear to be some strange bugs with Tomcat 3.1 that
might be related to class reloading:

First of all, as I've said, a servlet sometimes won't be auto-reloaded
if it's not defined in web.xml.  This is very annoying when you have
multiple developers working on a site.  Every new servlet has to
be defined in web.xml, even if there are no special attributes for
that servlet.  Notice I said also 'sometimes' in that sometimes it
*will* auto-reload a servlet not in web.xml and sometimes it won't.

Also, we recently had a case in which a servlet for file uploads
wouldn't work if it was defined in web.xml but would work once it
was renamed to something not defined in web.xml.  It also worked
once we restarted tomcat.

My guess is that there's some inconsistent behavior with regards
to servlet loading that needs to be cleaned up.  It should always
load servlets in the same way, always reload them if their timestamp
changes, and only require that they be defined in web.xml if there
are special settings for the servlet.  (Or maybe put a servlet-default
tag into the web.xml spec?)

BTW, I'm speaking of web.xml as in the web.xml file in the
WEB-INF directories.