Problem Solved

As I noted on the Pebble mailing list and elsewhere, I've been having problems with my installation of Pebble.  The pages have been frequently showing up without their associated cascading style sheet.  In addition, I've been getting errors that say some of the javascript files were not loading correctly.  All the errors seemed to be associated with static content in the war file.  My server uses Apache Geronimo with a Jetty back end.  Apparently other users with Jetty on their servers were having the same sorts of issues. 

Under Geronimo, the logs would show lines like these:

...
23765:  06:20:06,172 ERROR [log] /pebble/themes/_pebble/print.css
23845:  06:20:06,309 ERROR [log] Nested in
javax.servlet.ServletException: java.lang.NullPointerException:
23925:  06:20:06,310 ERROR [log] /pebble/themes/_pebble/handheld.css
24005:  06:20:06,478 ERROR [log] Nested in
javax.servlet.ServletException: java.lang.NullPointerException:
24085:  06:20:06,478 ERROR [log] /pebble/FCKeditor/fckeditor.js
24165:  06:20:06,616 ERROR [log] Nested in
javax.servlet.ServletException: java.lang.NullPointerException:
24245:  06:20:06,617 ERROR [log] /pebble/scripts/pebble.js
24325:  06:20:06,794 ERROR [log] Nested in
javax.servlet.ServletException: java.lang.NullPointerException:
24405:  06:20:06,794 ERROR [log] /pebble/scripts/prototype.js
24485:  06:20:06,938 ERROR [log] Nested in
javax.servlet.ServletException: java.lang.NullPointerException:
24565:  06:20:06,938 ERROR [log] /pebble/scripts/scriptaculous.js
24645:  06:20:07,078 ERROR [log] Nested in
javax.servlet.ServletException: java.lang.NullPointerException:
24725:  06:20:07,079 ERROR [log] /pebble/scripts/dwr-engine.js
24805:  06:20:07,703 ERROR [log] Nested in
javax.servlet.ServletException: java.lang.NullPointerException:
...

If you are running Jetty without Geronimo you may see entries in your log that indicate the error has to do with the GZIPFilter class. 

Anyway, Brendan Miller on the Pebble mailing list sent out a patch that took care of the problem.  Apparently there is a bug in the class used to GZip files for input and output.  This was fixed with a one line change to the web.xml file:

Index: src/web/WEB-INF/web.xml
===================================================================
--- src/web/WEB-INF/web.xml	(.../trunk/src/web/WEB-INF/web.xml)
(revision 49)
+++ src/web/WEB-INF/web.xml	(.../mine/src/web/WEB-INF/web.xml)
(revision 55)
@@ -74,7 +74,7 @@
 
   <filter>
     <filter-name>GZIPFilter</filter-name>
-    <filter-class>net.sourceforge.pebble.web.filter.GZIPFilter</filter-class>
+    <filter-class>org.mortbay.servlet.GzipFilter</filter-class>
   </filter>
 
   <filter-mapping>