How to grab uncaught exceptions in a Java servlet web application

Question

Is there a standard way to catch uncaught exceptions that happen inside of a java servlet container like tomcat or Jetty? We run a lot of servlets that come from libraries

Answer 1

In web.xml (the deployment descriptor) you can use the element to specify error pages by exception type or HTTP response status code. For example:

    404
    /error/404.html


    com.example.PebkacException
    /error/UserError.html

For a NetBeans-centric description, mosey on over to Configuring Web Applications: Mapping Errors to Error Screens (The Java EE 6 Tutorial) (or see the Java EE 5 Tutorial's version).