Hi there,

If there is anyone out there who can help out with this problem, I would
really appreciate it. Kindly mail your responses to ummairw@bigfoot.com

The Problem

Scenario

There are two servlets, ServletA & ServletB. When ServletA is called, it
generates a response in the form of an HTML form. When certain data is entered
on the
form and the form submitted to ServletB, the servlet is once again successfully
called. However, during the intialization of an object which makes use of
the pasrer.jar
& jaxp.jar external API’s, the following error message is displayed :

Java.lang.NullPointer exception

Configuration

Apache Web Server v 1.3.12
Tomcat 3.1 (Servlet Container)
JDK 1.2.2
Platform : Window NT 4 (Service Pack 5)
External APIs : parser.jar
jaxp.jar
Database : Oracle 8i
(JDBC-ODBC Bridge)

Requests to the webserver are handled and the appropriate servlets called.
It is felt that the Apache-Tomcat configuration is correct.

Alternative course of action

Once the sequence of events stated above is carried out on a system with
the identical configuration on the Linux platform, the error does not appear
and the
application performs properly.
(Although this probably doesn’t make a difference, but we do not allow the
application to connect to the Database due to the fact that the JDBC-ODBC
bridge is
not being supported in Linux)

Regards,
Ummair Waheed.