I am not sure if this problem is specific to Tomcat or not but when I deploy a web project as WAR file, one or more of following problems occur:
1. Jar files for referenced projects, generated automatically under Smart deployment mode, are missing the “.jar” at the end which leads to class not found exception when the webapp starts.
2. Deployer gets confused when new jars are added to a project after initial deployment so that deployed webapp will be updated with new jars and Redeploy doesn’t either. Workaround is to deploy fresh via Remove followed by Add.
3. Not all jars are copied to deployed webapp’s WEB-INF/lib directory. Redeploying has higher chance of this problem. Fresh deployment sometimes will work but not always, leaving the webapp with only part of the jars needed.
My guess is that there is a general problem with webapp library jar deployment code which causes these problems. Odd thing is that #2 and #3 error is unpredictable. NOTE that these problems existed for past couple of years. It’s just that I use exploded deployment during development then made up for the bugs manually for deployment.