Spring application not mapping in Tomcat

I'm convinced I have something setup wrong somewhere but I can't figure out where as I have tried following multiple tutorials and solution (viralpatel.net, stackoverlow question, another stackoverflow question) but I cannot deploy a simple HelloWorld Spring MVC to tomcat.

I have tried multiple tutorials on multiple machines (windows 7 and os x 10.7), and I end up with the same issue. The main tutorial I was following was the mykong Spring 3 MVC hello World example , I even tried to download the supplied source code and still cannot get it to work ( it is becoming very Frustrating).

My Server is apache-tomcat-6.0.36 and it appears to deploy to tomcat correctly but I cannot get to any pages (I have even tried just putting a plain html page in the root but that still gives a 404 error) but if I manually create a new folder "test" in the webapps directory and put a index.html in there then localhost:8081/test/ works fine. I have also tried Tomcat 7 but made no difference.

This my project structure:

this is my web.xml:

 <web-app id="WebApp_ID" version="2.4"
    xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee 
    http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/j2ee/web-app_2_4.xsd">

    <display-name>Spring Web MVC Application</display-name>

    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>mvc-dispatcher</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet</servlet-class>
        <load-on-startup>1</load-on-startup>
    </servlet>

    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>mvc-dispatcher</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>

    <context-param>
        <param-name>contextConfigLocation</param-name>
        <param-value>/WEB-INF/mvc-dispatcher-servlet.xml</param-value>
    </context-param>

    <listener>
        <listener-class>org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener</listener-class>
    </listener>

</web-app>

This is my mvc-dispatcher-servlet.xml

<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
    xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
    xsi:schemaLocation="
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans     
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-3.0.xsd
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/context 
        http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-3.0.xsd">

    <context:component-scan base-package="com.mkyong.common.controller" />

    <bean
        class="org.springframework.web.servlet.view.InternalResourceViewResolver">
        <property name="prefix">
            <value>/WEB-INF/pages/</value>
        </property>
        <property name="suffix">
            <value>.jsp</value>
        </property>
    </bean>

</beans>

This is the Controller:

package com.mkyong.common.controller;

import org.springframework.stereotype.Controller;
import org.springframework.ui.ModelMap;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMapping;
import org.springframework.web.bind.annotation.RequestMethod;

@Controller
@RequestMapping("/welcome")
public class HelloController {

    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public String printWelcome(ModelMap model) {

        model.addAttribute("message", "Spring 3 MVC Hello World");
        return "hello";

    }

}

hello.jsp:

<html>
<body>
    <h1>Message : ${message}</h1>   
</body>
</html>

Solution

As duffymo pointed out, my application wasn't being deployed correctly, So I right clicked on the project in eclipse and exported as a "WAR" file to my tomcat webapps directory and it is working now

You are not packaging and deploying your app correctly.

I'd recommend that you package your app into a proper WAR file, put that in the /webapps folder, and start Tomcat.

If the package is named foo.war, your URL will be: