KISS

bigg problems simple solutions ..It took me 2 days and 6 hours later to learn this lesson.The issue was with the deployment , things were going smoothly while coding and problems started when we tried to deploy the application. Initially found some abandoned jars in the lib folder , it took us a while to ensure that this was not needed as we removed them we found out certain entries made in xml files were redundant , the classes corressponding no longer there .. from here it was road to hell .. missing files, wrong config issues and we had almost made it when we encountered the dreaded 404 error ...everything seemed fine the path the jsps were all in place .. and in the end we tracked it to the webserver which was not configured for jsps ... does sound crazy ... we fixed that and found a similar symptom for the css, htm, java script files ... it was about this time that we got the app deployed

a lesson learnt Keep It Simple Stupid !!