I maintain a GWT web application that uses 3 java servlets for file download/upload and data transfer. I had my servlet mapping sin place and have not touched them in months, just a few days ago I started receiving 404 errors when trying to access my servlets. I can't even seem to access the servlets by typing their full path from the WEB-INF/classes directory (ie /servlet/com/company/project/servletname).
Unfortunately these are running off of a shared hosting plan and I do not have access to starting or stopping tomcat or much of anything else. Before I issues a trouble ticket with my hosting provider I just wanted to check to see if my assumptions about servlets are correct and to see if there were any steps that I should follow for this type of situation.
Does tomcat need to be restarted in order to use a new servlet uploaded to the "WEB-INF/classes" directory? Does tomcat need to be restarted to read changes to the web.xml in the "WEB-INF" directory?
If I put a .class file at /WEB-INF/classes/foo/bar.class should I be able to access it immeidately via "http://www.mydomain.com/servlet/foo/bar" or do I need ot wait for tomcat to recognize this new class file? Or do I have to include it in the existing web.xml servlet mapping file?
Thanks for any help