Created attachment 31971 [details] catalina.out Starting application examples using the Tompcat web application manager fails with a NullPointerException. Please, find attached catalina.out. Apache Tomcat/8.0.9 (Debian) JVM 1.7.0_65-b32 Oracle Corporation Linux 3.16.0 i386 Debian Bug report #753372 https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=753372
Absent some evidence to the contrary, the assumption is going to be that this is a bug in Debian's packaging since we haven't had any similar reports for the the Tomcat 8.0.9 release. If you can reproduce this with an Apache Tomcat installed from the ASF distribution then please re-open this and provided the steps necessary to recreate the issue from a clean install. To avoid reporting known issues that have already been fixed, I recommend testing with the latest 8.0.x release (8.0.12 at the time of writing) rather than 8.0.9.
It looks like this issue is caused by the symlinks to /usr/share/java/jstl.jar and /usr/share/java/standard.jar installed in the WEB-INF/lib directory of the examples application. Replacing the links with the actual files no longer triggers the error. This error doesn't appear with the tomcat7-examples package which also uses symlinks (Tomcat 7.0.55).
Then that is a packaging issue for Debian to solve. A default Tomcat install from the ASF doesn't use symlinks. It looks like the Debian folks have failed to read the migration guide, particularly the section on Web application resources.
Adding <Resources allowLinking="true"/> to the context solved the issue, thank you for the help Mark.