We have several REST applications using Spring MVC. Time to time some application after deploy don’t start. When our Javascript client tries access resource url, it gets 404 status code. Therefore it assumes, that resource doesn’t exist. More appropriate for us would be http status 500 returned in Tomcat response. Is possible change this default Tomcat behavior?

I've found similar problem with JBoss (uses embedded Tomcat) but no answer:
<https://serverfault.com/questions/367986/mod-jk-fails-to-detect-error-state-because-jboss-gives-404-not-500>