Struts2 panic and WebSphere fiddling

Absolute panic overcame me yesterday.

I'm about to wrap up a grueling rewrite of several ancient and poorly written (circa 2000) java apps, plus two truly hideous Net.Data apps.. which, to alleviate the pain and tedium, I decided to rewrite in Struts2. Not something I have a boatload of experience with, but I like to jump in the deep end ;)

The Net.Data apps were several pages in a single file. Back and forth with functions and HTML, several forms per page, with variables floating in and out everywhere. No scope, no state, no layers.

So chuffed by my rejuvenated Struts2 elegance, I deployed to WebSphere ND 6.1 - to find that every single action was 404. JSPs served, so I knew it was working, just not actions.

I even tried changing the extension to html! lol - it was nearly 8pm and I really wasn't thinking ;)

When I eventually got smart, i.e. googled it, I found a simple (somewhat dodgy) fix from IBM: Add a Web Container property called com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.invokeFiltersCompatibility