I did a little more work with Struts today. Finally, by watching the log files I was able to figure out where I was going wrong. This is a tricky ass thing to work with. If your config files are not correct, it will fail without giving any sort of sensible error message at the front end. The web application will not have all the stuff it needs to run, but the error you get through the browser is generally unrelated to the root cause, and instead barfing on whatever resource is missing. I know have it at least not erroring out. I'll try to get my login page actually logging in via Cayenne this evening while my wife watches whatever MTV Real World or Road Rules thing is on tonight.