Servlet: The server encountered an internal error () that prevented it from fulfilling this request

Topic:  Servlets 2.4

Application Server: JBoss 4.0.2 / Tomcat 5.5.9

Exception:

type Exception report

message

description The server encountered an internal error () that prevented it from fulfilling this request.

exception

java.lang.NullPointerException
 com.HelloWorldServlet.doGet(HelloWorldServlet.java:15)
 javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:697)
 javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:810)
 org.jboss.web.tomcat.filters.ReplyHeaderFilter.doFilter(ReplyHeaderFilter.java:81)

Resolution:

The cause for this exception is the absence of an explicit call in the overloaded init() method that has the signature: public void init(ServletConfig config)

The first line of the method should be super.init(config) to remove this exception.

A better way to resolve this is to override the parameter-less init() method, the one that has the signature: public void init()

In this version of the init(), there is no need for the explicit super.init(config) call