I'm fairly inexperienced with java and haven't had any experience with SOAP at all and have been trying to get a Sample SOAP webapp working. After I startup tomcat and go to http://localhost:8080/soap/admin the Apache SOAP Admin page comes up and if I try to click on any of the buttons on the sidebar I get this error:

Error: 500
Location: /soap/admin/list.jsp
Internal Servlet Error:
org.apache.jasper.JasperException: Unable to compile
at org.apache.tomcat.facade.JasperLiaison.javac(JspInterceptor.java:873)
at org.apache.tomcat.facade.JasperLiaison.processJspFile(JspInterceptor.java:708)
at org.apache.tomcat.facade.JspInterceptor.preInitCheck(JspInterceptor.java:493)
at org.apache.tomcat.facade.ServletHandler.service(ServletHandler.java:413)
at org.apache.tomcat.core.ContextManager.internalService(ContextManager.java:874)
at org.apache.tomcat.core.ContextManager.service(ContextManager.java:790)
at org.apache.coyote.tomcat3.Tomcat3Adapter.service(Tomcat3Adapter.java:64)
at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Processor.process(Http11Processor.java:793)
at org.apache.coyote.http11.Http11Protocol$Http11ConnectionHandler.processConnection(Http11Protocol.java:702)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.net.TcpWorkerThread.runIt(PoolTcpEndpoint.java:571)
at org.apache.tomcat.util.threads.ThreadPool$ControlRunnable.run(ThreadPool.java:644)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)


I have my classpath set to include 4 .jar files (activation, mail, soap, xerces) and have edited the startup.bat file (hopefully correctly) to load xerces first, and also have copied soap.war into the tomcat_home\webapps directory. Any help with what I might be missing would be greatly appreciated.

Like I said I'm inexperienced, and have probably forgotten something trivial.

What is the actual error the JSP compiler reports?
It will tell you what's going on, the bit you posted is just telling that there was an error...

Remember that your system classpath is NOT the classpath for a web application (or for Tomcat itself).
A webapp classpath consists of the content of the WEB-INF/classes directory and the jarfiles in the WEB-INF/lib directory belonging to that webapp.

I've resolved this issue, but I now have another question.

I can get the service to deploy by using the apache soap admin page in my browser, and I can get the client to interact with the service.

The problem I'm having is when I try to implement a deployment descriptor in order to deploy the service from the command line. Like I said, there are no problems deploying the service from the admin page, but I'd prefer not to have to do that everytime I want to use a service.

Here is the error when I try to run my deployment descriptor from the command line.

Input:
C:\demo1>java org.apache.soap.server.ServiceManagerClient http://localhost:8080/soap/servlet/rpcrouter deploy soap.xml

Output:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.apache.soap.server.DeploymentDescriptor.fromXML(DeploymentDescriptor.java:470)
at org.apache.soap.server.ServiceManagerClient.main(ServiceManagerClient.java:230)

Is there a problem with my command to run the deployment descriptor, or is it more likely that the problem is in the code of the deployment descriptor itself?

U have to include Jar files for the Jasper Reports,,,
Depending upon ur used packages and methods, u have to add that particuler jar file then u can execute successfully,,,,,,