Tomcat applicatoin upload issues

[brucew]

A longtime client asked me to manage a dedicated for them. It's running FC4 and Plesk 8.0.1 and Tomcat.

While my experience with Plesk dates back to PSA5, I've never had occasion to use Tomcat and am at a loss as to how resolve problems with it.

Their programmer sent me the following note this morning:

I've been fighting all day trying to get Tomcat to load our app correctly.
I've tried both uploading a war and installing an exploded application.
Neither work. There seems to be some sort of class loader problem while
running under Plesk.

In uploading a war, I get the error:
SEVERE: Parsing error processing resource path /WEB-INF/struts-config.xml

There is nothing wrong with this file (it works on my local box). The error is
being caused by a failure to load the mdo.jar file in the /WEB-INF/lib/
directory.

I also tried installing an exploded version of the application, but am running
into the same problem.

I've done a bit of googling, see if I can figure out the problem, came across
this:

Before you use the Plesk Tomcat setup, be aware:
* We have hit errors on webapp upload
* We have hit problems setting or changing the webapp mount point
* The tomcat configuration used by Plesk is not documented, and therefore
difficult (impossible in our experience) to modify
* We have hit tomcat server.xml parsing issues.

How compatible is Plesk with Tomcat?

Any ideas on what may be wrong here? I'm looking at the catalina.out log for
errors, is there an error log for plesk somewhere?

Any suggestions?