Hello.  j2ee is driving me mad.  I'm trying to develop some new apps
based on a beginner's book I've read, and I keep failing, so I keep
scaling back my 'ambition', and I keep failing....

So here's what I have.  Apache 5.5.17, using FoxFire as browser,
everything running on my Windows XP personal edition.

I have an app:

webapps\SimpleWrite\index.html

It's just an html page with references to other html pages.  The other
html pages don't exist yet.  (Maybe that's the problem!), but I type:

http://localhost:8080/SimpleWrite/index.html

It works.

Now, I add to my webapps directory the following:

webapps\SimpleWrite\WEB-INF

I try "running" the same address in my browser, everything works out
okay.

Now I add to my webapps directory an empty web.xml file:

webapps\SimpleWrite\WEB-INF\web.xml

I try "running" the app again in my browser and now it fails.  With
"Requested resource unavailable."

So I fill out my web.xml file like so:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>

<!DOCTYPE web-app
 PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.3//EN"
 "http://java.sun.com/dtd/web-app_2_3.dtd">

<web-app>
 <welcome-file-list>
   <welcome-file>index.html</welcome-file>
 <welcome-file-list>
</web-app>

And then I "run" the app in my browser again, and it still fails.  So
could it be the dangling references to html pages that I haven't
created?  Well, I change index.html to print the message "Hello
There!!"  I try to load it in my browser and I still get the same
failure.

What am I doing wrong?  Could it be typo? and probably more
importantly, what basic concepts am I not getting here?  J2EE is
driving me mad.

Thanks.