Portlet anyone?

Today I have been trying to get a portlet to work. Without success. I could not believe it could be so difficult to deploy this stuff. How can anyone stand this? It's no wonder people run away to Ruby on Rails.

Example: The error message is "NullPointerException".
Translation: please remove log4j.jar from your WEB-INF/lib folder.

Another example: "The portlet.xml could not be found". I am quite sure the file is there! Cause is yet to be found. Some pointers I found told me to check 4 other files. I did, no idea yet what could be wrong there.

Please spare me from more JCP junk.

(For those interested: I tried to run the Spring MVC portlet example in Pluto 1.0.1. I made one change: the name of the application.)

Update I know, I know. It is not fair to criticize open source projects. There are actually people that put their heart in this kind of stuff, and they deserve appraisal for it. Unfortunately I am now in the situation where I have no choice and actually have to use an under documented Pluto version.

This morning I found I overlooked yet another Tomcat log file (localhost.log) in which there were clear class not found exceptions. These provided enough pointers to get things running pretty quickly.