title: Class not found exception in Struts 2
body: <p>I am using java web development and seem to be having some issue with some classes not being loaded properly. From reading online and from similar problems, they key take away was that one has to be sure to include all the necessary jar files in their right place. I believe that I did that correctly. This is the error that I get when I start Tomcat</p>
  <pre><code>java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.filter.StrutsPrepareAndExecuteFilter
  at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.loadClass(WebappClassLoader.java:1702)
  at org.apache.catalina.loader.WebappClassLoader.loadClass(WebappClassLoader.java:1547)
  </code></pre>
  <p>This is my directory structure</p>
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/aGO70.png" alt="enter image description here" /></p>
  <p>This is the content of my web.xml</p>
  <pre><code>&lt;?xml version=&quot;1.0&quot; encoding=&quot;UTF-8&quot;?&gt;
  &lt;web-app xmlns:xsi=&quot;http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance&quot; xmlns=&quot;http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee&quot; xsi:schemaLocation=&quot;http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee/web-app_3_0.xsd&quot; id=&quot;WebApp_ID&quot; version=&quot;3.0&quot;&gt;
    &lt;display-name&gt;ProtienTracker&lt;/display-name&gt;
    
   &lt;filter&gt;
       &lt;filter-name&gt;struts2&lt;/filter-name&gt;
       &lt;filter-class&gt;org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.filter.StrutsPrepareAndExecuteFilter&lt;/filter-class&gt;
   &lt;/filter&gt;
  
   &lt;filter-mapping&gt;
       &lt;filter-name&gt;struts2&lt;/filter-name&gt;
       &lt;url-pattern&gt;/*&lt;/url-pattern&gt;
   &lt;/filter-mapping&gt; 
    
  &lt;/web-app&gt;
  </code></pre>
  <p>The error message is also vague and was wondering how anybody might go about debugging it.
  Any insight would be appreciated!</p>