Why getting error “The absolute uri: [http://tiles.apache.org/tags-tiles] cannot be resolved in either web.xml or the jar files deployed”

Question

I have a Java web application built with Spring MVC, JSPs, and Apache Tiles.

The same WAR file works fine on Windows 10 and Mac.

But on Ubuntu (18.04 on Amazon AWS) I get an error:

org.apache.jasper.JasperException: The absolute uri: [http://tiles.apache.org/tags-tiles] cannot be resolved in either web.xml or the jar files deployed with this application

My pom.xml file has these tiles-related dependencies ...

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.tiles</groupId>
    <artifactId>tiles-jsp</artifactId>
    <version>3.0.7</version>
</dependency>

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.apache.tiles</groupId>
    <artifactId>tiles-autotag</artifactId>
    <version>1.2</version>
    <type>pom</type>
</dependency>

And the resulting WAR file has the following JAR files in the WEB-INF/lib folder ...

tiles-api-3.0.7.jar
tiles-autotag-core-runtime-1.2.jar
tiles-core-3.0.7.jar
tiles-jsp-3.0.7.jar
tiles-request-api-1.0.6.jar
tiles-request-jsp-1.0.6.jar
tiles-request-servlet-1.0.6.jar
tiles-servlet-3.0.7.jar
tiles-template-3.0.7.jar

Also note, the tomcat /examples application seems to work fine. I'm pretty new to linux ... could this be an Ubuntu-related file permissions thing?

More stack trace details, in case it's useful ...

org.springframework.web.util.NestedServletException: Request processing failed; nested exception is org.apache.tiles.request.render.CannotRenderException: ServletException including path '/WEB-INF/jsp/f_layout.jsp'.
    org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.processRequest(FrameworkServlet.java:986)
    org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.doGet(FrameworkServlet.java:870)

[...]

org.apache.tiles.request.render.CannotRenderException: ServletException including path '/WEB-INF/jsp/f_layout.jsp'.
    org.apache.tiles.impl.BasicTilesContainer.render(BasicTilesContainer.java:399)
    org.apache.tiles.impl.BasicTilesContainer.render(BasicTilesContainer.java:238)
    org.apache.tiles.impl.BasicTilesContainer.render(BasicTilesContainer.java:221)
    org.apache.tiles.renderer.DefinitionRenderer.render(DefinitionRenderer.java:59)

[...]

org.apache.jasper.JasperException: The absolute uri: [http://tiles.apache.org/tags-tiles] cannot be resolved in either web.xml or the jar files deployed with this application
    org.apache.jasper.compiler.DefaultErrorHandler.jspError(DefaultErrorHandler.java:55)
    org.apache.jasper.compiler.ErrorDispatcher.dispatch(ErrorDispatcher.java:293)
    org.apache.jasper.compiler.ErrorDispatcher.jspError(ErrorDispatcher.java:80)
    org.apache.jasper.compiler.TagLibraryInfoImpl.generateTldResourcePath(TagLibraryInfoImpl.java:251)
    org.apache.jasper.compiler.TagLibraryInfoImpl.<init>(TagLibraryInfoImpl.java:122)
    org.apache.jasper.compiler.Parser.parseTaglibDirective(Parser.java:431)
    org.apache.jasper.compiler.Parser.parseDirective(Parser.java:489)

Answer 1

The problem turned out to be that for some reason Tomcat was no longer looking for the Tiles library's TLD file inside the Tiles JAR file. There's a way to turn off TLD scanner ( <Context processTlds="false" ... /> ) but mine wasn't turned off.

I don't know what I did to cause this to start happening -- I made very little changes to the tomcat configuration.

A workaround to stop the problem was to manually copy the TLD file from inside the Tiles JAR file and copy it to the /WEB-INF folder. That made the problem stop, but then I'd have to do this for many other JAR files in my project. (For Example: After doing it for Tiles, I got the same error for SpringSecurity).

In the end, I created a new Ubuntu 18.04 instance and installed fresh copies of Java and Tomcat, and everything worked.

UPDATE:

After fiddling with config files, it's likely the problem I had was caused by this line in /var/lib/tomcat8/conf/catalina.properties ...

tomcat.util.scan.StandardJarScanFilter.jarsToSkip=\
*.jar,\
[...]

... which caused all JAR files to get skipped during scanning.

Answer 2

The same thing worked for me. I'm doing a tutorial using spring boot and apache tiles-jsp version 3.0.8. I extracted the contents of this jar using the following:

jar xf tiles-jsp-3.0.8.jar

This wrote the contents of the jar into my directory. I found the tld files in the META-INF directory. I copied them to my WEB-INF directory, redeployed, and the error went away.