If you’re trying to deploy a war under Tomcat and it isn’t going like it should be, the first thing you do is look in the console if you ran it from a console, or the log files in Tomcat’s homefolder otherwise. Now this provides you with some details as to why something went wrong, but there is the chance that de application itself is throwing exceptions unlogged which are caught by Tomcat. Those are not logged by default by Tomcat! To log these as well, you’ll need to utilize log4j.

read on